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)

So things have been working out pretty good!  I got up to speed with java/libgdx pretty quickly, and my project is running great on desktop/phone/and OUYA builds.  I might have spent a bit too much time working on rendering the sausage bodies.  The original game just drew images for each link, so they looked pretty blocky.  After some experiments, I decided to write my own shaders for them in openGL.  It’s actually skinning the mesh in the vertex shader, and each frame all I update is an array of the node positions. The vertex shader computes the normals between the node and the previous/next segment, and used that to position all its verticies.

I found a neat trick for making curves in a fragment shader via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cloop/loopblinn05.pdf.  You can see in the bottom left, the discarded pixels are shown as white.  I was able to determine convex/concave orientation in the vertex shader without any if statements, but wont be using the convex shapes unless I can figure out how to stencil the sausage shapes somehow (the convex area is drawn on top of the segment fill area).

There is still some work to do with capping each end, and allowing for changing the sausage length during play, but all in all it’s pretty neat.

I’m getting a bit worried about getting everything done by the end of october.  I’m going to switch gears and work on my level design pipeline.  I think I’ll make the levels in Blender, and write an exporter that will format them to be readable in Java.  I want to use a lot of vertex colors for the scenery, with textures here and there to flesh things out.  I also might play around with using the z axis to get some nice parallax and 2.5D effects.

So on my last update is announced I decided to write multiplayer into my October challenge project. Well all the basic “need to have code” is there. You can see other players and worlds sync up server/client. Now I just need to add in some prototyping stuff and than I will show off the game with the help of a friend playing from a separate computer. Hopefully I can do this by tomorrow.

Anyways, good luck with your project’s and can’t wait to see (and buy) them!

So, Christmas is practically around the corner, right? Well anyway, I’m going to making a Christmas-themed game. It’s going to be called “Christmas Market Manager” where you get build your very own christmas market, build booths, get customers ,get rich and build the very best christmas market in the whole world. (Sorry, this sounds more like a marketing pitch than anything else.)

From a gameplay point of view it’s going to be like a very much stripped-down version of “Theme Park”, you have simple grid where you can build your booths on and you can use buffs (like some kind of Santa Clause who attracts new visitors) to attract new visitors. You do have some loose goals in the game like “Get 100 visitors”, “Make X amount of money” and so on.

It’s acutally something I’ve been prototyping for a long time and I’ve always tried to release a few weeks before christmas, but either real life got in the way or I totally forgot about it. I already do have a few graphics and some music available, so this should make the job a lot easier.

Here are some screenshots of the earlier prototypes:

This is the first prototype which I did a couple of years ago made with JavaScript and Raphael.js

This is another prototype for iDevices which I made with Objective-C with the excellent Sparrow Framework

From the technical perspective, I’m going to use CoffeeScript and my own game framework for JavaScript the web, which I’ve been in some projects for the last 1 1/2 years. As much as I would love my game to work on mobile devices, I do have some features in mind which would not work that well on the Android browser (like day-night-cycle, snowflakes and a couple of CSS3 animations which look really nice).

For the moment I’m concentrating on making it work on browsers, putting it up on Kongregate by the end of month and getting $1 through ads.

And hello there! This is the second instalment of Space Mines K2013 aka “K240 and Space Mines plagiarism tour”.

In this part I’ll introduce you to the main parts of the game mechanic.  So let’s get stuck in…

Actually, wait a sec, before  we go on, I need to tell you that the majority of the graphics are ‘borrowed’ from an image search and therefore totally not mine. I did the menu’s etc. but actual graphics that look good are someone else’s, thanks, you know who you are. They’re used here as place markers and to put together a general feel, later i’ll do everything in Blender3D.

There are two main components at the  moment – building, and buying/selling.

A building we will go,…

Starting the game

When you begin the game your base or HQ is set up for you.  Here you can access statistics on your population and a few other things, if I have the time to implement them.

Build Menu

This is where you find all the buildings you need in order to set up various aspects of your colony.  For instance, you might want to produce ore to sell and as a building material by setting up some mines. You’ll also need some accommodation for your employees to live in!

Big buildings

These are 2×2 squares in dimension. I was going to leave them out as I wasn’t sure how to handle them. Then I stumbled on the following article about K240 and how large buildings may have been implemented.

In a nutshell, big buildings in K240 are simply single  buildings copied over to adjacent squares.  A reference then points them back to the original building portion, or something like that.

The main issue I had was making sure the cursor resized to the large building when clicking on it, rather than treating it like a bunch of single square buildings.  The code goes something like this (it may not be pretty, but it works for now. Any suggestions on alternative implementations are welcome):

// Get the type of building chosen from build menu

startX = Math.floor(mouse.x/level.tile.width);

startY = Math.floor(mouse.y/level.tile.height);

building = getBuildingChoice();

If the building object returned has an attribute of large = true, then place large building by checking adjacent squares for an empty space:

if(building.large){

    if(isEmpty(startX+1, startY) and isEmpty(startX, startY+1) and isEmpty(startX+1, startY+1)){

        tilemap[startX][startY] = building;

        // Large buildings with be created which are a copy of the original

        //so there's only one true instance.

        tilemap[building.x+1][building.y] = new Large(building.x+1, building.y);

        tilemap[building.x][building.y+1] = new Large(building.x, building.y+1);

        tilemap[building.x+1][building.y+1] = new Large(building.x+1, building.y+1);
    }
} else {

    // place small building
tilemap[startX][startY] = building;
}


Selection Menu

What’s happening down in the mines!?

Right, so you built something,  now to find out what’s going on in there!  This is where the selection menu comes  in to play.

This tells you how many people are working, how much ore it produces (in the case of a mine) and how much it cost to build.

You can also upgrade your buildings to increase their capacity in terms of workers and storage (or living space, i.e.  for accommodation).

Building Simulation

So it’s probably worth mentioning, that there is a little more to this building stuff than may be apparent. When you first start you have a population of say 100 people (it changes every new game). So now you have 100 people without jobs or  a roof over their head.  If a building requires workers, then workers will be fed in to them until they are at full capacity.  Same goes for living, as you build accommodation, the population will begin to set up home.

This means you need to have enough work for people, but also enough people to work. If there are only 3  people working  in a mine that runs with 10, then they’re going to get p*ssed off and become overworked.  Eventually they’ll just leave by boarding the transporter.  You can hire them back, but obviously that costs money.
The Transporter

Do you sell burgers?

This takes us nicely on to the transporter.  In K240 the transporter was a very important aspect of  the game.  You could buy blue prints for new technology, colonise other asteroids, and sell your goods.  Similarly the transporter in Space Mines K2013 has a similar roll (one could say identical).

Unfortunately my transporter is not yet developed to the same degree. At the moment you can sell  ore, and buy food and workers.  Once you dispatch the transporter it sets off  for Earth with all your ore.  Once it returns to your colony (in a few days), that’s when you get paid for your ore, not before. So you need to plan ahead.  Anything like food supplies and workers are already on board and so can be added  to your inventory immediately.

Conclusion

I think that’s about it for now.  Naturally I’ve skipped over a ton of stuff, but will provide more details and how I intend to do the graphic side of things and new mechanics such as the research component.

You can try out the current (basic and rather buggy) version below.  It works great in Google Chrome, but I can’t speak for other browsers at the moment.

Space Mines K2013

Thanks for reading!

And today we talk about banners. What do you think about banners in mobile games?

I’m going to add banners for non-premium users and want to ask you what do you think about it. I want to add banners that don’t annoy users.

The first banner you will see when you start the game is a little banner on the bottom-left of the screen. It appears where no enemy appear and it stays for 15 seconds. The first 15 seconds of the game are the most easy and with less enemies. When the game starts to be more difficult the banner disappears.

Banner #2: After you end a game and click to continue there is a full screen banner that you can close immediately with a big X on the top.

Banner #3: Little banner on the right-bottom side where you see all your player challenge.

You can disable banners from in game purchase, the “premium” feature. It will cost something like 1€ and will give you some special features too.

What do you think about the banners? Are they too much?

 
Thank you =)

Contact 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

If I finish my current project by the end of October than I may enter in the October Challenge. I have been using this site for 3D models with much success.  If I have time I’ll post updates of my game…

Tags: October Challenge 2013

Gyahh, I’m not even 1/3rd of the way through making my game!

I always seem to take a lot more time over making games when I’m not doing a game jam, which is obvious but fairly frustrating.

I’m going for what is very much an arcade game that looks and feels like it could have been releasedin the early 80’s, with the pallette and sound limitations of the time very much in place. I’ve gone with Unity3D as it’s the only tool I can wield aside from a few older programs which isn’t the best for making a 2D game in but does have that all-important easy to port to anywhere factor.

How am I going to get that elusive $1 this time around though?

I’ve put a few games out with banners adverts already and this game isn’t going to be any different in that respect although I’m hoping to get in-app purchases, including consumable “extra credits” and extra ships to play with as part of the plan to monetise it. I’ve not played with IAPs before so I figure I’d best get some experience with this and the October Challenge seems to be the best place to start out with this.

Most of the main game is ready and working on Android but all those important features such as Achievements, Local and Global High Scores, Multiple Language Support (thanks Google Translate) and Freebies for sharing on Social Networks all need to be added and supported through promo videos and a website to point reviewers to. It’s going to be one crazy month, that’s for certain!

Realistically, I might finish completing the game by the end of October although what with expecting a new babby mid-way through the month it may well be wishful thinking!

Anyhoo, here’s a fairly recent screenie, including RAM / ROM check screen, it should feel authentic yup!

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

Woohoo! I think I have the physics just about where I want them: nice and “crispy”! The only thing I might change eventually is the wall jump, as it feels a little unnatural at times. However, I don’t feel its going to hinder the progression of my game design as it stands right now.

I also decided I need to take some time to really consider how I wanted to flex this game’s “fun” muscles before I dove too far in. I have a great concept, but as far as execution went, I hadn’t thought too specifically about how to make it a well-oiled machine as opposed to a cluster of gimmick-stages. So I fell back on some of my personal musings about the construction of games, particularly this writing: http://wp.me/p3AkJt-4V

So where were do my priorities lie? As a ninja-based, action platformer, surely this was going to fall somewhat on the instinctive side of things: a healthy dose of speed with some nice variation to keep the player on their feet. But I was also struck more profoundly about the side-effect of my reset power: the ability to directly undo your progress. In most games, progress is undone as the result of stuff like a lost life or failed objective… mistakes by the player. But not this game; the player has direct control over the ability to undo (some) progress. And as I said before, the mischief here is that such a thing can be for better or for worse.

So what does this mean for the design of the game? Obviously, I’ve been working on the fluidity and speed, as I want the game to feel crisp to control. Pacing will be important to some of the potential chaos that can ensue. Beyond that, I think the utilization of some simple switch-ups and traps will keep the player guessing at times. My suspicion is that the player might start to lean on the reset power as a panic button when needed. A simple trap might spring that puts the player in an urgent situation. Do you mash the reset button in your haste? Careful, you may have to backtrack and redo a certain section of the level to get back that lost progress. I want to utilize little things that can subtly punish the player.

So, in summary:

• Capitalize on speed for a more urgent pace
• Throw little but meaningful wrenches into the mix
• Challenge the player’s ability to maintain progress without punishing them too heavily

Part of it is about making the “reset” power complement the frenetic nature of the action platformer. Give the player their speed and control, then let the subtle change-ups and reset power keep them alert and mess with their head a little. Haha… I like where this is going!

I really enjoyed working on my 7dRTS entry in July, and I kept updating it for another 5 weeks or so after that. It has become a supply-lines oriented strategy in which you need to balance the advance of your combat units with the advance of their supporting supply-lines.

– Terrain is randomly generated.
– You start with 20 units which are quite similar apart from the range at which they can attack, and you cannot make any more so it’s a bit like chess in that regard.
– The only resource is hitpoints that accumulate at supply-points, and those hitpoints can be transferred to any units within range to heal them.
– You start with one supply-point which has hitpoints being pumped into it continuously, so you don’t need to gather any resources or manage an economy. But you do need to manage the movement of that supply across the map by setting up supply-points and supply-lines between them.
– Supply-trucks will travel along the supply-lines and can be attacked by the enemy, and supply-points can be captured if an enemy unit comes inside them while none of your combat units are there.
– Combat units will slowly lose hitpoints by moving, so they need to be backed up by supply-points to be kept fresh.
– All units can move anywhere (land or water), but changing elevation incurs a speed penalty, and crossing into and out of water takes a long time.
– The time taken to cross into or out of water is greatly reduced within supply-points, so they also function as ports.
– Line-of-sight visibility calculations means that using terrain features is important.

This idea started out as an attempt to make an RTS game with no resources at all, because I find resource gathering and eco management to be a boring chore that gets in the way of the more interesting spatial activity of moving combat units. However, the game did not have much depth with only combat units. The supply-lines were a way to reintroduce a type of economy, but make it an entity on the map with significant spatial influence instead of just a number in the corner of the screen. I also think it makes for more realistic scenarios because the supply has to actually travel to get somewhere, instead of teleporting around instantaneously which leads to comical situations like a factory continuing to produce units even when it is completely surrounded by the enemy.

I think the interaction of the supply-lines, terrain features and line-of-sight visibility could give some interesting gameplay.

*** Sorry, there is no multiplayer, just a rudimentary AI enemy ***

Video with info, download link in description:

(Original 7dRTS page)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=7091

I finally decided on the name. There were many game names out there, but I only found 6-7 available. This one seems to fit the game theme the best. New title screen is ready, using the same Ruslan font.

Today I learned difference between Comparable and Comparator in Java. I changed the bullet code, so that you can fire multiple bullets (laser fragments) at the same time. Also, you don’t need to touch the alien to shoot it, but rather just fire in its direction and bullet hits it. Instead of going with full collision detection, I simply extrapolate bullet trajectory at the moment of firing and see which alien it hits first. This worked fine for all levels until the Boss level. Since Boss spits other aliens, he gets to be the first in array and bullet would fly through all the aliens and hit the boss. I left this behavior if you touch the boss directly. But, when you just shoot in some direction I’m sorting the aliens by y-coordinate to shoot the nearest one.

This new feature changes gameplay a bit. It’s now easier to play, and more enjoyable as aliens you shoot are no longer obscured by your finger. The game has turned from “precise touches” to “shooting fest” and only that 10-bullet clip prevents you from destroying everything in two seconds.

I guess I’ll now have to make alien movement even more challenging, so that the game doesn’t get too easy.

Day 12: Part 2

I started to like the game too much, and decided to work on it more before going to sleep. On levels 16, 26,… I added a big moon, and aliens are hiding behind it. The moon slowly moves across the screen, just in time to finish before the Boss level. This makes the gameplay really challenging. It was also challenging to do detection whether aliens are hidden behind the moon or not. Since moon is round, rectangles are not very easy to use. I looked into pixel-precise detection, but I’m afraid it would slow the game to look individual pixels each time a shot is fired – especially since moon is rotating all the time. So I just reduced the original sprite rectangle by some 12% and I’m doing the rectangular checks instead. It is not pixel-precise, but it works really well. The way it works, bullets fly over the moon and aliens fly under the moon, so you can shoot those who haven’t reached the cover yet.

I’m really satisfied with the gameplay now. It’s fun, challenging and engaging. Now I need more bosses, a couple of more alien types and powerups. Without powerups it’s a real challenge to reach wave 60, so I’ll try to create enough content to have new stuff show up at least until level 100 without repeating bosses. I guess it will be easier with powerups. We’ll see once I add those.

This is the first time I’m feeling it’s going to be a great game, rising above the average space shooter.

Today I worked on another new boss. This one is a giant aircraft. It was really easy to implement using Unity Playmaker. The gameplay is simple: The enemy moves using a Math Ping pong function. The health and attacks are handled by a simple Finite State Machine. One FSM runs the health, the other, the attacks.

I originally thought of only doing one boss, and a few levels. By reusing code, art, and Playmaker FSMs, I’ve been able to cut my development time in half. My new goal is to finish setting up ground enemies. I also need to redo some of my level encounters. I am aiming for at least 3 mission areas (unique environments) and 5-7 levels. If I can get one more boss going, I’ll do 4 areas. I think that should be enough content for a free ish web game.

After that, its the generic polish polish polish. I think I’m in good shape to release this before the end of the month.

I added a new boss and now I have two of them. Here are the alien names so far: Worker, Eater, Hairy, Glider. Bosses are called Worker Boss (it looks like big Worker and spits small Workers) and Borg (it’s cube-shaped and destructs into big cubes).

I also added the shield. I have drawn this nice shield icon before. I drew it using Inkscape and got inspiration from a some YT tutorial. I tried to follow the tutorial (it was for Adobe Illustrator, not Inkscape), but failed. So I started to observe some shields that I like and noted how it’s just a bunch or curves and gradients. I slapped Hairy on it, it looks really nice. This might even become the application icon for Android.

Anyway, the shield can be invoked at any time. It lasts 20 seconds. There will be some powerups to upgrade the shield to last longer. If aliens hit the shield it loses energy much faster, so you should still try to shoot them down even if shields are up.

Shield graphics looks like force-field. It required some manual messing with Gimp to draw it nice as I wanted a nice circle-segment instead of straight line and casting a gradient shadow that way doesn’t seem to be supported. Maybe there’s some trick I don’t know. So I combined multiple linear gradients at a different angle. It turned out really nice.

I tried adding some glow to the shield icon, but then it stands out too much. I’ll leave the glowing for situation when powerup flies across the screen and you need to pick it up.

With these new graphics, it starting to look like a complete game. I’m still thinking where to place the score multiplier and whether the current wave should be shown.

I’m also thinking that player should be able to buy some powerups before playing, but this would require some coins or something like that, and with current, fast gameplay it simply would not fit. Maybe a some aliens could leave some crystals behind them or something like that or random powerups would show up. Or you would simply get as much coins as the number of waves you survived.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 12th, 2013 at 4:20 am and is filed under October Challenge 2013. 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.

Hi guys, I’ve been slaving away for the past 13 days and I feel in the mood for sharing what I have created thus far.

The game is a sort of fusion between tower defence and top down shooter which takes place amidst burning rivers of lava. Using your keen rock throwing ability you have to fend off packs of ravenous monsters until you can get your hands on a machine gun and perhaps some sort of multi-missile launching machine. Not going into too much detail here, but you can read more and follow the progress HERE if reading this has sparked some wild excitement.

This is the state of my todo list (looking like an awful lot for just 19 days):

Finish coding player weapons
Think up and implement player upgrades
Program, model and animate three different enemy types
Create a non-horrific GUI (not looking forward to this)
Add some music and sfx
Improve the graphics
Balance
Polish
Test
Bug squash
Release
Pray for some income ^^

All right, thanks a bunch for reading, or skimming through or whatever you did and I wish you all the best.

-Seb

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

Hey everyone. My Thursday and Friday ended up being quite long and eventful, and I was feeling a little burned out. On top of that, I might be getting sick. But who wants to hear about my woes? C’mon, y’all wanna hear about the GAME, right? So despite another absence, I knew I needed to get back into it before I let my rhythm get too heavily jarred.

So I’m chugging along, even if it be slowly. I started programming resettable game objects today, like the fading/crumbling platform. I’ve also brushed up the resetting power a bit so it doesn’t cause cloning (start position player and reset position player). I actually think the programming and stuff is going to be a bit simpler than I anticipated. Again, I think simplicity will be my friend here. I just think its going to be a matter of picking up my pace just a bit so I can make the October deadline, as I still have some graphical and musical stuff to think about.

So I still don’t have a whole lot to show, but I’m trying to keep some form of steady pace. I chose Stencyl because I know its good for rapid game-making and publishing a Flash game gives me an easy target for my $1. Stay tuned for some (hopefully) more substantial updates in the near future!

Guild of Dungeoneering
“Recruit adventurers to explore dungeons for the glory of your Guild. Build the dungeon room by room, fill it with monsters, traps and treasure .. and hope your dungeoneers have what it takes to return victorious!”

[A dungeon crawler where you don’t get to control the adventurer. Instead you lay out the dungeon one room at a time (including treasure & monsters) and he proceeds according to his AI. You want him to explore, level up, find treasures and ultimately survive – but you don’t get to directly control him.]

Playable link:
–> Guild of Dungeoneering <–

Feedback:
In this devlog thread, please! (or to @gambrinous)

TODO list:
– Hero character & movement
– Remove tile-choice mechanic, replace with a random set of things you MUST place at the start of each turn. Example: a goblin, a +1 dagger, a new room.
– Monster, item sprites
– Hero moves to one room next to him only (of his choice), after you place things.
– Speech bubbles for heroes (& monsters) to show their intent & add a little humour (eg ‘Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?’)
– Bug with ‘?’ explorable spaces that have multiple entry points (only uses first-seen entry point)
– Bug with possible room/corridor tiles coming up that you can’t fit anywhere
– Actual RPG elements (eg levels, equipment, etc)
– Some sort of battle system (automated)
– Replace placeholder art

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

Still chipping away…

I was working on configuring basic gameplay settings that apply throughout the entire game, such as level exit conditions, total restarts of a level, item collection… stuff like that. Not much to write home about… again. But hey, progress is progress.

Hey all, what’s up? Part of the reason I haven’t been posting much on here as of late involves my work schedule changing. Since one of my coworkers is going on vacation this month, I’ve been working alot more hours than normal and some of my real-life has gotten in the way a bit. I hope to have a functional game by the end of the week. Then, I can start doing stuff like working on menu screens, score systems, maybe trying to update the graphics, etc. Enjoy!

Here’s a screenshot of what I’ve gotten done so far (these are just placeholder images, by the way) since the last time I posted:

I may not seem like I’ve done much which this project from a visual side of things, but if you saw the original code vs the new code, you would probably smack me since there wasn’t any kind of structure or form to it and it was really messy (which lead to bugs when I started doing more than drawing the Hexes on the screen).

First, I created an Entity interface with an AbstractEntity class that would contain methods that would load Textures, create Actors, and manipulate those Actors (translate, rotate, resize, etc.).

Then, I created the Ingredient and Candy interfaces that both have their own individual Abstract classes that are also extensions of the AbstractEntity class since both the Candy and Ingredients used to make that Candy are going to be displayed on the screen.

Lastly, I created a Manager interface and AbstractManager class that contain methods to group together all like Entities and create them all at the same time so that the Main class (this time, it’s actually all being run through a Screen class instead of the main one), contains the least amount of code possible.

By implementing these new systems, I was able to compress quite a bit of the code down to only what’s needed for each class and also was able to track down and get rid of some bugs that were caused because of bad and messy code.

Tonight, I implemented a randomization method into the IngredientManager class that will attach a random Ingredient to each Hex on the screen, as seen above.

The next steps, attach each Ingredient to whatever Candy needs them with a specified amount, allow selection of individual Ingredients with the mouse, change the color of only the Hex that the Ingredient is on, and several other mechanics.

I created a YouTube video showing some gameplay and first two bosses:

On my blog I wrote a detailed explanation how to make a YouTube video of libGDX game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2013 at 5:33 am and is filed under October Challenge 2013. 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.

So, a small post about what’s going on for MinimalShmup.

Because of the courses, I can’t work as much as I want, but the game is still being improved.

Now, the game is completely working with a gamepad, I added the structure of the HUD, and I’m implementing the scoring system.

The scoring system should be like this:
– You have one normal shot that power up when you take a powerup bonus, and a special attack that you can use with you gauge counter.
– The gauge is filled by shooting on enemies and you can “stock” them. ( You can have, for example, 3 full gauges and 1 half empty ). The gauges are in fact the amount of Bomb/Special attack/Analyse you have, but you can switch between them. Imagine you have 10 gauges, you can choose to use one for a bomb or switch to you special attack and use one for it, you’ll have 9 gauges after that.
– The gauges count in the scoring system, after each level, a multiplier is applied on you gauge counter and also on your lives and on the rank.

I’m also trying to optimise everything, and I’ll work on the first level, so I’ll be able to put a beta version here.

Stay tuned for more infos soon!

bonus: a screenshot

Tags: gamedev, minimalshmup, news, shoot'em up

Hi, I didn’t take the time to report about my progress here until now, so here I go!

The game is about destroying obstacles for a little character that you don’t control,
obviously, this little guy will take some detour, and give you a hard time

I aim for a joint release on android and windows / linux. Ah, the joy of cross platform coding!

For making the game, I use my own homebrew engine along with an editor for rapid level editing / testing,
the editor use winform / C# while the engine is coded in C and most of the game logic work through lua scripts.

So far, I have 6 levels, and most of the coding is done, now I have to work on providing more levels, adding sound and music and obviously add polish to the whole.

So, I finished a game. It is Dodge, which is nigh-identical to my LD26 entry, because not many improvements can really be made.

I also took it to market, if you can call it that. What I really mean is that I took it to GameJolt (Here it is).

As for making $1… Well, it seems to be harder than you’d imagine. After about a week and a half, I’ve accumulated the grand total of $0.01. Jubilation!

Intense times!

Dammit, how does anyone do this?

It’s a pleasure to announce that ZoOp! is now available (worldwide?) on the AppStore!

–> CAPITALIZM RULEZ! <–

Here is the trailer:

And a few screenshots:

Although the game was almost ready at the beginning of the month, it was still lot of work to make it available on the AppStore. Overall it has been a great learning experience, a bit painful though. I mean we all like to write code and/or do arts. But what about marketing?

So what now? Basically I’m sending mails and creating threads like an headless chicken. Trying to make as much noise as I can. I feel like a small ant in a huge colony 😀

We’re glad to see that an article about our game Alien Cortex, submitted to the october challenge, has been written on http://indiegames.com/2013/10/alien_cortex.html !!!

That’s so cooool and gives us the motivation to make more (better and better) games

You can pre-order our game for $1.49(instead of $2.99) and support his development via our website: http://www.atraxgames.net/sym/#buy
or on Desura: http://www.desura.com/games/sym
Playable demo: http://www.indiedb.com/games/sym/downloads/sym-demo-v04beta
here’s the trailer:

It’s been a while since we actually released our game, I just never got around to posting about it here. We weren’t originally intending to do the October Challenge but when I saw what it was I decided to enter our game into it.

Elemental Balance was created for the Fight Magic Run battle (which unfortunately disappeared ]:). So here it is! It was created in 48 hours with the theme of Balance. After the 48 hours I copied the game over to a new project and worked on it for another ~1 week. Within the time that it was published to GameJolt (9 days) we’ve achieved 14 cents in ad revenue!

Hopefully you guys enjoy it We definitely enjoyed working on it.

Game Link
Ludum Dare Link

There’s a few differences between the screenshots and the uploaded game D:

While Ditto and I have been keeping the DreamTeam alive by working on an actual game for the October Challenge (our Indie Speed Run entry: The Old Man And The NSA), I’ve also decided to release a new compilation album that features all of the music I’ve made for Ludum Dare games, LD warmups, and other game jams in general.

Presenting:
GameJams Volume One


21 tracks and a super secret bonus track that will unlock when you download the album… all clocking in at around 50 minutes. Some of these games placed very high in the audio category, with two of them actually bringing home a Gold Medal… something that I never expected. You see, my first Ludum Dare entry had NO AUDIO AT ALL. I was very disappointed with myself and decided to try much harder in the audio category. I worked at it and worked at it until I actually ended up receiving a Gold Medal for audio during Ludum Dare’s 10th anniversary for my entry, ZUNZANDA. So I’m living proof that Ludum Dare is a wonderful way to push yourself into new territory, learn new things, and accomplish goals you never even dreamed of. I owe all of my current and future success to Ludum Dare, and GameJams Volume One is kind of like my ‘origin story‘ of game development, as this content dates all the way back to the very first game I ever released.

So what are you waiting for?! You can hear the entire album and PAY WHAT YOU WANT for the download right HERE.

You can also snag the official soundtrack to DreamTeam’s Ludum Dare 27 entry, EcoStar vs Aeronox right HERE.

Thanks for your support and LONG LIVE LUDUM DARE!

Tags: album, free, game music, music, pay what you want

Daily challenge is to collect 5 letter which fly like powerups do. Once you collect them all, you get some coins to buy powerups. This is a way to get easy free coins just by playing the game. I was inspired by Subway Surfers when creating this.

Missions are various tasks for player to complete to earn coins. Coins are used to buy upgrades and expendable items like shields, bombs, etc. Missions come in sets of three, and you need to complete all three tasks to earn the reward.

For the missions I figured that it would be easiest to use the builtin multiline text wrapping. However, the line height is too big, and I could’n find a way to reduce it. At least, not from code. Then I edited the .fnt file generated by BMFont and just changed

lineHeight=33

to

lineHeight=23

I added 5 pixels of drop shadow around all letters after the bitmap was generated initially, so I’m now reducing height by ten (5 pixels above, and 5 below the glyph).

While searching the docs for this, I found something else I missed before: Depending on the font you choose for the game, numbers might not look very nice as glyph for digit “one” can we very slim, and numbers like 11 look odd. To solve this, you can fix some of the glyphs in the font to use fixed width:

font.setFixedWidthGlyphs("0123456789");

This looks really good, but I already did some design decisions that used the slim-glyphs “feature”, so I’m not going to use this.

Hey guys, I just wanted to mention my game which I have been working on for the October Challenge 2013. Two weeks ago I was working on a puzzle combat game for android, Tank Tank: The Tankening. The project was going well but it was taking allot of time to develop the large number of levels I needed. So in order to get a product out for the holiday season I decided to switch my focus to a new, smaller game.

Emergency Landing Disaster is my take on mobile flight simulation. Allot of the current flight games on Google Play feature little to no flight realism, and instead use clumsy physics and movement systems. After coming across a new Unity plugin called UnityFS, I was shocked to realize how easily it would be to bring realistic flight to mobile, and how much fun I would have doing it.

My plan is to create 10 crash scenarios and develop a fun and intriguing game for flight enthusiasts and action 3D gamers. It will be a free title, so my monetization method is Admob smartbanner ads which I never show during game-play. I also hope to add Unity Cloud with interstitial ads for the load-screen; whenever the service matures from private beta.

As usual this project is only possible thanks to Unity3D Pro and the Unity Asset Store with its many talented 3d artists. So far, here is what Emergency Landing Disaster looks like:

Tags: airplanes, android, Google Play, iOS, unity, unity3d

Okay, I implemented some scoring, and I still have a shitload to do though…
Here’s a video of what it looks like for now. I’ll change the sprites, reactivate the hitboxes ( and recheck them, ’cause it’s weird ).
It’s playing pretty well with a gamepad.

For the week-end now, I’ll do some more stuff of the game like:
Add the menus, reactivate and debug hitboxes, make real levels ( and not that crap with copy pasted enemies apparitions ), change the sprites, add the almost final scoring system, debug more, and a lot more things.

And I’ll release a beta version on sunday I think.

So, here we go for the video, enjoy:

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

Short answer: homework and midterms this week. That about sums it up.

So down to business then, shall we? So first, the October Challenge. I can’t say I’m overly thrilled to say this, but I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. I have quite a few big things coming up school-wise near the end of October. As is often the case with LD, never seems to be enough time, eh (though timing is only half the issue; read on)? But that being said, I’m still planning to work on SOMETHING; I just don’t see it coming together before the end of October,and whether I continue this current idea or not is up in the air.

Which brings me to my next point. Why would I want to drop my idea? Actually, I’m not convinced it has to do entirely with the idea. I’ve come to a bit of a conclusion lately: I’m just not enjoying game-making like I used to in Stencyl. As a nitty-gritty programmer type, a part of me WANTS to work with hard code. And simply put, I’m just not sure Stencyl is at a point where I can really flex the power I want. Particularly, its the data management quirks that really get to me. Obvious things (define my own classes, stronger data scoping control) I can do with hard-coding don’t appear even remotely simple/obvious with Stencyl. Ultimately, its the trade-off of using a particular engine, of course; I want to be sure that I highlight that Stencyl is an incredible piece of software and its some of those streamlined features that kept me around, but for my personal tastes I’m just not sure its cutting it anymore. It’s just not as enjoyable for me.

So what’s the plan then? At least initially, I’m going back to my roots with Python and Pygame. Though I know that may raise the question of speed and performance, at this point and time I’m not too concerned about it. I’m going to try and build a personally-coded library on top of Pygame for my game-making needs and see how that goes. I’ve learned quite a bit, actually, from using Stencyl, and I feel better equipped to start more from the “ground-up” approach. And who knows? There are a lot of opportunities: in the future I could look into learning C#, as I know the popular Unity engine runs off of that. I think, at least for now, Python will suit me just fine; I know how to work with it and I have designed two rough games in it before.

So in short, I’m not going away. I’m still in the rough design phases with my Python coding (per my school and personal experience, I’m trying to get this whole “planning” thing down a bit better), but the gears are turning a bit more vigorously than they were before. And if you like Stencyl, don’t worry! I’ll probably still be around the forums and may still post some Stencyl-related materials on my blog here and there.

So there you go. Photon out.

—————————————–

Must admit though: I’m seeing a lot of stellar looking stuff (my eye has been caught my that drone game in particular)! Hopefully I’ll be playing some of it in the near future!

There is 28 hours until IGF submission deadline and I plan on getting all of my base mechanics, art, bugs and sound finished before then.

What is my game?? It is an JRPG-RTS hybrid. The over world, party mechanics and inventory are those of an RPG, while battles, dungeons and other such events are handled as a Zelda Four swords with more than four heroes… or Pikmin where each pikmin is customisable.

It is meant to be played with ONLY a keyboard or a gamepad(USB Xbox controller), no mouse. This is done by your main units controls being on the left side of the controller/keyboard and the rest of your party on the right side. It’s kind of hard to grasp with when you start but you get better after a little bit.

There is a typecast menu to give orders to specific units since there is no area select. If I was fighting an Ent that’s spraying parallizing spores around him I would want a long range fire attack. I would press the enter key which would pause the game FTL style and you would be given a few options to chose from ” Magic”, “Range”, “Melee” or “Stat”. You would want to chose “Range>>Magic>>Fire”  then you would press enter again and order those selected units to attack. It’s better played than explained.

Also the world, quests and monsters are randomly generated.

I would spend more time explaining but there is barely any time left.

My body is ready.

Weekly challenge will be to collect some amount of stars during a week and get some nice reward, like 8 atomic bombs, 5 shields or similar. I made a nice gold star in Gimp. I tried different particle effects on it and also some diffused star-light, but it did not look really good. So I went back to the particle effect used for powerups and tweaked that until I got something distinct for the star. Stars show up on their own pacing, so you can have both a star and a powerup on the screen at the same time.

I also worked on loading and saving player data. It was much easier than I expected. I expected to have to learn some Android data storage API, but for simple key-value storage, libGDX provides the Preferences class. Just init with:

Preferences prefs = Gdx.app.getPreferences("DroneInvaders");

and then use get(“key”, defaultValute) and set(key, value) to read and write the values.

The only thing I had problems with are the dates. To keep track of daily and weekly challenges, the game stores the date of last play. When player launches the game, it compares that and resets some counters. Theoretically, I could prevent players from changing the system’s calendar to past date, but I don’t want to. What I am doing, is setting new set of daily and weekly challenges when day rolls over and resetting the counters for number of stars and letters picked up.

To make that work, I had to get the day difference between the previous play and current date. It matters whether it’s the same day, exactly one day apart or more than one day. Googling got me to various websites and StackOverflow questions. Answers are funny. Many programmers simply calculate difference in seconds and then divide by 60 * 60 * 24 to get the days, completely ignorant about issues with daylight savings and leap seconds. One could argue that it does not matter that much for a game, but still getting many bug reports twice a year doesn’t sound like fun to me. Some other guys simply count the days by adding one-by-one from start until they reach the end. While those loops might look correct, they still miss sometimes as they do not take the time out of the calculation. If one object stored 01.Jan at 5am, and you calculate it vs 02.Jan at 23pm, adding one day to first object is still less than the second, so they add two and get 2 day difference.

One of the tricks I use in this situation is to always set the time of the earlier Date to be something like 10am, and set the time for the later Date object to 5pm. Since daylight changes always happen at night, this is safe. And we also have 7 hours in between, just in case someone in future decides to do daylight saving changes in the middle of the day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 19th, 2013 at 10:41 am and is filed under October Challenge 2013. 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.

Hey guys!

I thought since this is where I got heavily inspired by the indie scene, this would be a great place to share the start of my Game Dev career.

Today I put out my first real game; Lil’s Big Adventure. Rescue Lil, a little pink ball who fell in a hole from the creepy monsters that block his path.

<- This is Lil

I’ve been working on this game for a while, but there is a reason for this. I created everything from scratch. I programmed everything, I wrote all the music in Famitracker (which is really hard if you aren’t musically trained), and I drew literally everything down to each pixel. Every map is randomly generated with randomly placed enemies for a different experience every time.

If you guys could give it a play and let me know what could use improvements or of any errors that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for reading this

http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/lil-s-big-adventure/18445/

I’m making this game as an experiment, so I don’t expect to earn much money. This game is going to be free to play, with option to buy coins in the game if you want. I like the way it’s done in games like Pudding Monsters where players can play everything without paying at all. Drone Invaders will be completely playable without paying a dime, so it is not a kind of “pay to win” types. However, I still want to enable players who can’t wait to have fully powered up weapons right away.

I opened the Google Play account without problems. It was $25, which is fine. I just read some blog post where a solution to saturation of Google Play was suggested – it proposed to have $5000 registration fee, so only developers who are serious would apply. I’m not sure if I would apply for $5000, it seems so me that only big studios who are already making money on other platforms would participate.

However, opening a Google Merchant Account is mission impossible from my country. So, what are the options. Well, you can still add payments with services like Fortumo or Centili, but this has two problems: 1. it goes against Google Play terms of use, so you either risk getting your account suspended or you only publish to other Android app stores (there are some 30+ as far as I can tell, and some stats say they make up about 30% of the market, although this seems too high to me). 2. to enable payment via SMS, your game needs to ask for two system permissions which users probably won’t like: send and receive SMS. Although this is the only way to enable monetization in some countries, if you aim for US market, it’s a bad idea.

Third option is to start a company in USA and register account that way. This is of course the right thing to do if you expect to earn some substantial amount of money from your game, but having an US company brings in some costs. There are specialized agencies that can register you a company in Delaware. Delaware is a USA state and a tax-haven. Of course, you can always tranfer the earned money from there to yourself, and then pay the taxes locally on that transfer. I’m not ready for this step yet, as this is my first game and I have no clue if I will make any money of it.

Luckily, I have a friend who lives in US, so we opened an account under his name, and the game will be released under that account. At least merchant account is available for US individuals. I still don’t understand why Google won’t allow merchant accounts from my country, when I’m receiving money from their AdSense directly, without any problems. I guess not all departments of Google have the same policy.

Hi guys!

Begins one week Jam where you can win a Unity Pro license. More information here: http://devcup.nextcastle.ru/?eng=1

Thanks!

I am taking Chemistry currently. I was assigned to make some sort of project to celebrate Mole Day. I decided, “Hey, since I know how to use Gamemaker, I might as well make a simple game.” And that is exactly what I did. This is my Whack-a-Mole game.

P.S. Mole is a unit of measurement. Mole day is celebrating that unit.

Game Download: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ax94l4df3dxyqbd/Whack-a-Mole.exe

Source: http://www.mediafire.com/download/y39bj7oa6vg59kl/Mole_Day_2013.zip

Hey guys,
some news about MinimalShmup.
It’s now time to think a bit about what happend this week-end.

As I say, I thought about releasing a beta this Sunday night.. It’s not going to happend.
Why ?
I worked as hard as I could, something like 25 hours and maybe I could do it if I didn’t find a crappy bug in the game.
At some point ( it looked random in fact, I still don’t know why it did that bug, and I don’t even know if it’s really fixed now.. ) when loading the stage 2, the sprites were absolutely not the right ones.

I think it was because at the beginning I was loading the levels from text files, and then I added a .tmx file parser to load my level created with Tiled Editor, and because it was loading a bit from the .tmx and a bit from the text file, it did some weird things.

Now it seems to be working, but I wasted few hours fixing this, I lost my mind, felt like crap and wanted to burn anything around me.
I also underestimated the amount of time needed to make the menus, and spend some time to try optimising the rendering.

So now, it’s working, but there is a lack of content, and I still need to make the musics for the 2 firsts levels, so I decided to not release anything now, and wait to work on that.

About what was added since the last update:
– I added and fixed the special power, the bomb power and the shield power. It’s working great, and I’m still tweaking the scoring system, but I really enjoy playing it ( even if it took me a while to not die on the first level xD ).

Because I really need to see if the game is working on other pc’s than mine, I’ll still put an alpha version of the game on Monday or Tuesday, so you can comment on it and help me to fix bugs and improve the gameplay and stuff.

Now it’s time for me to sleep, see you guys for other game updates!

Although I have a wast library of wav sfx files I accumulated over the years, I’ve seen other game devs use Bfxr to create their own effects, so I decided to give it a try.

This is nice, because you own the effect 100% and you don’t need to prove where did you get the audio file. Some of the sites I used to download my sfx in the past are no longer online, and tracking people who made those is impossible. For example, my favorite mod music is Aspirating Milk which I found on modarchive. I tried to contact the author via e-mail in the tracker file, but got no reply. It was probably his address at university or something.

Bfxr requires Windows or Mac, while I prefer doing my development on Linux. I thought about running it on Wine, but didn’t even bother to try because I found this:

http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/

It’s a super easy to use and simple Flash app you can run in your browser. I highly recommend it.

These sfx programs produce various simple sound effects. Some complex sound effect can be created by mixing a couple of simple effects in a program like Audacity. I used it to create sfx for Atomic Bomb powerup:

BTW, I basically completed the game, I’m now testing on various Android devices. I’ll probably do the release on Google Play store tomorrow or day after.

If you happen to have an Android device with an OS greater than 2.0.1 and would like to try out my game it would be greatly appreciated. You MAY need to download the game on a PC and install it manually. Any feedback you could provide would be appreciated. Please comment on the game, bugs, feature requests, etc.

Thanks, J

DL : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8575435/Ribbon.apk

Already suggested additions:
-Smoother line movement
-GUI Scaling for larger screens
-Increase menu scroll speed
-Exit app button
-return to menu option from game screen
-highscores or distances saved

What can I say, it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride making this game.

First things first this is the final game http://www.kongregate.com/games/lparkermg/til-the-infinite-line
And this is the Webpage for it http://til.moon-gate.co.uk/

After finding out about the October challenge I already had an Idea on what I was going to remake my original LD27 game called Grav Nav. Which would have worked but it was pretty difficult to replicate how it worked and I changed focus half way through.I decided to look into maze and dungeon generation to see if I could get any ideas from that but nothing that could be done in the time I had left…

So I looked around at my stalled projects and found one I had called ST W (SingleTrack World) where each stage was generated to a certain length using blocks and decided to Incorperate that.

Inititally the development of TIL was pretty easy to a certain extent with the fact that most coding errors where human error. But the hardest part was the level generation itself when I introduced the difficulties, due to TIL originally being slated for Windows 8 I was pretty worried about the Frame Rate which TIL was running at.

Last night though was really pretty tight. As my self imposed deadline for having TIL up and out there was to be for the 21/10/2013 and that included bits such as testing, building etc. Which I found out that for some reason there were a few errors in building the code for TIL under Window 8. Each time I tried there were errors and I really didn’t have the time to fix them, so I made the last minute decision to switch to building for web. (Which actually turned out better than expected…)

Any way enough from me Have a Play on TIL and have fun. I’m off for a lovely holiday in Scotland.

Tags: game development, Moon-gate.co.uk, TIL

If I’m not very much mistaken, Thursday of next week will be the last day of October, and thus the last day of my October challenge to sell Stargazing. Well… it’s not like this was going to be easy.

Fishing for constellations. Not the final star art.

Coming primarily from the programming side of games, it perhaps isn’t too surprising that what seems to be taking most of my time is everything but that. It’s easy to underestimate the time required to think through the layout of a game, and in this case the narrative. I still very much want to have a submission ready next week, but at the same time I won’t be attempting to throw a broken, unfinished mess onto the App Store.

Lately I’ve worked on the visuals a bit and I do have something of a UI coming through. The “hub” screen where you will select the level to enter needs more art yet. I’m honestly only about halfway through the level data so that remains a big task for this week. And I need to make sure all my textures are square to unbreak the iPhone build’s appearance… I’ve also had a pass at the audio and there is a piece of music in there now.

This week I really need to finish the content so that I might be able to carve out a little testing/fixing time.

Hey guys, I’ve worked a lot on the game the past few days, and would like to have your opinion on the game, and I also want to know if it’s working great on other computers than mine.

So, here’s the MinimalShmup Alpha Version 0.1:

Actual features in the game:
– Power Switch System:
You have 4 powers, with common gauges that fill by shooting on enemies.
– Bomb Power: You suppress every shot on the screen for a short amount of time
– Shield Power; You have a shield that protects your ships during 2.5 seconds, preventing you from dying.
– Special Power: Your ship shoot a lot of homing bullets that kills almost everything on the screen.
– Discover Power: There are treasures in the stages, that reward a good amount of points. Will you sacrifice some of your safety so make more points ?

– Gamepad/keyboard support:
The game is currently supporting xbox 360 gamepads / arcade sticks and also keyboard.
– Xbox: RT to shoot, X to power switch, Y to use your power, Start to pause the game.
– Keyboard: Space to shoot, X to power switch, C to use your power, ESC to pause, arrows to move.

What’s still in development:
– Fixing bugs.
– More enemies.
– More patterns.
– Tweaking the scoring system.
– Local leaderboard.
– Musics.
– Better graphics!

For the moment, the level 2 is still empty but the boss is working ( even if nearly impossible to beat ). Also, there is no music, because I prefer to improve the gameplay first. The menus are a bit weird too.
So, that’s why I need to get the more opinions/bug reports possible, to make it the best the fast I can. I don’t want to release an unstable game or that feels odd or that isn’t fun.

Download it here
Don’t hesistate to comment on the game! I’ll respond as soon as possible.
Enjoy!

So, I’ve been working on a game for over a year now. Not sure if that really counts for October Challenge but I’m finally done!

Here’s the website!

http://www.codeherdstudios.com/AsteroidSmash.html

Do you live in the greater Boston area? Are you a game developer? Do you love two day game jams based on a randomly selected theme? Of course you do! So come on down to the Boston Game Jam: Purple Monkey Dishwasher on November 9th and 10th in Boston’s gorgeous Fort Point at the offices of Cantina. We’ll be doing a two day gathering for people to make a game and meet other creative game makers in the area. Free food and beverages will be supplied, and lots of other perks too, like chairs, and ambient lighting and esoteric art pieces on the walls. You can’t beat that kind of value in a free event!

Register for the event at the EventBrite page here: Register

We’re taking theme submissions from registrants via our Wufoo form here: Theme Submission

Any questions can be directed to boston-game-jam@cantina.co (not .com). Hope to see you there!

Tags: boston, game jam, real world

I’m not sure how does an average Android game fare, so I’m making my stats public and hopefully someone would compare with theirs and tell me is this good.

As for the marketing, I posted to Java-gaming.org, to my Twitter followers (which were around 200 at the time), and to Hacker News. Story on HN was picked up really fast, and reached the main page and stayed there for a day, I got about 150 new Twitter followers out of this and a lot of re-tweets of my blog post link.

Here’s the stats page:

http://slagalica.tv/drones.php

UPDATE: I’ve got my first sale!!! If you’re the one and reading this, Thank you!

Someone bought the smallest coin package (7500 coins) for $0.99. My profit from this is $0.69. Well, looks like I need just one more sale to complete the October challenge

Here is woot happened during a week on the AppStore a.k.a the Wild Wild World.

And here is what happened during that epic day of eternal glory:

After one week on the AppStore I sold 13 units of ZoOp! which should amount to 20$ dollars on my bank account. LD October Challenge is a TOTAL SUCCESS!!! However my balance is still negative considering the Apple Developer subscription fees and the 70$ I paid to build a shadeless tent for filming the trailer (which was a lot of fun BTW). So this, and considering the efforts I put to make this game makes it a TOTAL FAILURE!!!

Little story: I got contacted by a US TV to feature my game. I was so happy thinking ‘hey, some guys in this world believe in my game!!’. I was so wrong. Turned out they asked me to pay between 2-3k for producing the segment. In short they wanted me to pay them to produce their crappy show which would only make prejudice to my game, at best.

I feel down. So down, and stupid as well.

What I learned doing this October Challenge: World is filled of bad people trying to make money on you. Exact opposite of the LD community which is full of handsome people helping each other. At least we have a safe heaven, thanks all of you

Hey guys! This is my newest game called Fukke! Right now the game is multiplayer only, I’m going to work on an AI these next days. This game has been in development for 1.5 days now. The game’s development went smooth as fuck. No big bugs or anything.

I came up with this game after we got an school-assignment to make a boardgame. The teacher wanted us to come up with a way of movement, other then dice. And then this came out of my head. I felt like I could easily program that in a computer game. So here we go.

I’d like to know: What field-size do you prefer, like what should be standard one?
Then we can use that size for the real thing.

So what is still to come?
► Singleplayer (vs AI)
► Maybe slight gameplay changes
► Visual changes of course!
► More custom settings.
► Networking(???)*

*I am going to try to make my game online once again. I tried this with Combat Time, but it failed. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not working on it anymore. This game should be a lot easier to make online though, since the data being send is a simple number.

Have fun!

Hi guys!

This is my very first blog post and, to be honest, I don’t really have an idea what to write. Should I tell you how bad I am at programming or how good of a community LD is? Or should I insert a nice little joke to show you what great sense of humour I have? Maybe I should just keep it simple (that’s right – no jokes for you :D).

Soo I am looking forward to participating in the 0h game jam tonight and I was wondering if you can help me with some tools you might know for creating games super-fast. My first decision was to use XNA, but after a little research I decided that Puzzle Script was not  a bad idea either.

Have you participated in something like that before? Is there any vital advice you can give me?

Hi,

For the last ludum dare, I have worked on a small puzzle game : Make Way. It was a great experience to make it.

Now, I wanted to show you a new version. There is still lots of work to do (sound, music, more levels), but I think it deserve a preview.

Here is the last version (with better graphics and detailled instructions) : http://nee.free.fr/ld27/final1/

You can compare with the original submission :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14085

Thank you for playing !

I am very surprised I got up in the middle of the night to make a game in (pretty exactly) 0 hours. And even more surprised that I actually finished (well kinda)! I used all the time until the very last second. I didn’t manage to export it in time, but I don’t think anybody would consider that cheating… Here’s a screenshot and a time lapse video.

Play the game here [JAR]. Move with the displayed keys to eat green bits and avoid red ones. Losing ends the program.

Luckily, I didn’t lose any time, since I got to experience this hour twice.

Tags: 0hgame

Epic Moustache of Fury made in 0 hours for http://0hgame.eu

Download: here

Hi!

We (there are two of us!) wanted to join October Challenge two weeks ago but our work on project have delayed. We realize that probably we won’t finish our project till end of Ocotber but we want to do as much as possible in this last few days and show our game to you. This is the first time we show it to bigger audience.

So what it is?
Few months ago we decided to learn how to make mobile games. Before that we have made only some ugly prototypes. Best way to learn is to make something, but what? Every game developer shoud make his own pong (right?)! So we started our own. After making playable pong in libgdx (using box2d) with single and multiplayer we decided to add more game modes. One of that modes was music mode. That mode took next few months of development and became biggest thing of the game (propably throwing out initial pong modes from the game would be good move).

We want to release game when at least 4 levels will be done. We will add next levels in updates if someone will play it. At the moment we have one and a half of level. If you know some music that fits game (mix of dubstep and chiptune would be the best) let us know in comments! Don’t forget to leave your feedback about the game! Check out the video (LASERS at 1:25!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFpXs8qm3E

Also we are looking for slow (at least at the beginning) Ambient/Chiptune track like Dustforce – “9-bit Expedition” for first level.

I’m going in for the upcoming mini LD, I wasn’t even sure it even deserved a blog post, but I’m pretty excited. I just got ahold of a new tool (DXStudio) that has just recently gone free (for non-commercial AND commercial use!). I also modeled something for me to use when it starts :

I’ll be taking a swing at SharkJam this weekend. I’ll be using the following:

GM Studio
Paint.net
Pickle Editor
sfxr
FL Studio

Good luck everyone!

Tags: sharkjam

OMG (to coin a popular acronym), there’s only a few days to go before the end of the Ludum Dare October Challenge! And as per usual I got insanely distracted by new things to add to Spacemines, one of which was Robot workers and the impeding Robot rebellion that would ensue should you have too many of them on your little asteroid.

The features I would like to draw your attention to are 1.)  the general shape, and 2.) the fact that there are some areas of the map which are inaccessible.  Based on the aforementioned article, and having missed a few steps out of the process, this is what I ended up with:

Looks good enough for my purposes to be honest, although I’m aware I could delve in to Perlin noise for a better job, but it seems a bit heavy handed for what I want.

How’s it going?

So now Spacemines has a universe (or asteroid belt) with a number of randomly generated maps to visit and mine the hell out of.

Clicking on a red square takes you to an asteroid, and the currently selected asteroid is marked in yellow.

The next step is to allow the user to dispatch their transporter to each one for colonisation should they discover them on their radar or probe (haven’t decided how a player discovers a new asteroid yet).

The good thing about these maps is that it suddenly adds a new dimension to the game, you are restricted by space but also how you arrange your buildings within that space. Big buildings need to be place carefully otherwise on some maps you just don’t have the room to place these 2×2 monoliths and they can be pretty important i.e. factories, research facility, HQ!!

The image below shows another potential candidate for colonising, once you’ve got the funds and dispatched your transporter across.

Spacemines is pretty much there but due to a bit of feature creep and work on not-so-necessary aspects of the game it won’t be a fully fledged A* title as I had imagined it. However, you will be able to play it as I iterate over it in the next week or so (please forgive any bugs or crap game play at this point).  An early release will hopefully encourage some feedback so I can really polish it off.

Thanks for reading… next time we will be delving in to the Isometric world!

Here’s another in-game photo of NIKRA^

CHECK OUT THE BLOG!   http://www.endesga.blogspot.com

The character is holding one of the 3 legendary pickaxes.

Until next time,

-ENDESGA Studios

I’m into the SharkJam at this weekend. It will be my first jam and I will team up with  friends. tools to use:

• Unity3D 4.2 (C#)
• Paint.Net

This weekend I am going to start participating in Ludum Dare contests. I will be participating in SharkJam! I have an idea for a game already, just not a taken title.

This is my obligatory “I’m in” post. I have no idea what type of game I am going to make yet. But I will most like be using

> Unity
> Gimp for picture editing/ drawing any assets
> archive3d.net for 3d models
> freesound.org or bfxr.net for sounds

I will definitely not be making another horror game (my last two 48 hour comp were horror related) but I’m sure I will think of something. Recently, I have been testing/creating some super mario galaxy like gravity, so maybe I will include some of that.

Also, since it is almost Halloween, if anyone wants to play some slendermanish like horror games made in 48 hours, I created one for IndieSpeedRun 2.0 and one for Asylum Dare.

The first is Cirque Du Accro that I created for Indie Speed Run. It involve acrobats and some woods near a circus and some bad habits such as alcohol and cigars (My theme was bad habits, and special element was acrobats), which you can play at my post on IndieSpeedRun. Unfortunately, I just found a bug that can prevent you from finishing the game (damn you 48 hours!), to prevent this, try not to grab each item more than once (some of the items take a few seconds to disappear, so trying to grab them multiple times before they disappear can prevent you from finishing.

The second horror game that I made for Asylum Dare is called Midnight Stroll and can be played from my post on the AsylumDare website here.

Finally, we started on the October Challenge 2012 and finished just now before the end of the October Challenge 2013!

We have just published our game for free on Google PlayStore  and you can download it from here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getfun.treevolve

The game TreeVolve is available on the Playstore for FREE. Help Puripom to reconquer their native city and protect them against the enemys. Fight against people all around the world, experience a new type of battle and come up in the leaderboards!

Today, I started to brainstorm about our entry. We decided to make a Shark vs. Coast Guard name and here’s a (very cheap) mockup.

I mind as well… The more the merrier!

I’m not sure if I’ll be jamming with anyone, but my stuff:

Language: GML (Game maker 8 Pro)

Graphics: Paint.net, maybe Photoshop, Game Maker

Audio: Audicity, LMMS, sfxr, any program I can get my hands onto

Drink: Lemonade, maybe soda (Cola :P)

Initial goal… Find out how to make some more Water Physics, just because every game MUST have water, right?

…Right?

Make Cash out of your games!

There is still time!

Don’t worry, I’m here to help you.

I wrote an article on how to maximize your profits using In App Purchases (IAP), you may be able to complete the october challenge in a day, check out the article here: http://gamejolt.com/profile/felipebudinich/blog/news/in-app-purchases-how-to-maximize-your-profit/13145/

Cheers!

In my personal slow-Jam I’m working on I decided to leave everything to Random and a few parameters.

Still there’s the need for levels, and the very basic requirements that everything should be connected, walled in and have a nice balance between narrow passages and open spaces.

There’s probably well known and better ways to do this, but any case, since I think the end result was more or less exactly what I wanted, I’m gonna outline how I did.

1. Define an allowed geometry by normal sampling a width and height of the map (in tiles). I used a 2D boolean array as representation when doing the calculations
2. Randomly seed some few (<1%, but more than ~7) positions so that each has a safety margin to the border of the array
3. Iteratively connect dots by randomly selecting one not connected to the others and walk towards the closest other true position following Manhattan distance = 1 setting all passed positions to true.
4. Repeatedly randomly select any edge pixel and randomly select one of its 4-neighbours that are unused and expand there.
5. When sufficient number of tiles have been placed. For all edge tiles, place a wall in all unused positions with a chessboard distance of one

This is the result of three maps generated after one and other:

I only need quite small levels as each is only meant to last for maximum of 60s and the game is absolutely way too confusing to allow for larger levels, but in principle it would only require some parameter tweaking to get them too look quite differently.

I also like how one sort of can see where the seeds must have been placed.

Of course if anyone is interested in the code just let me know (it’s C# for Unity, and it’s not super-efficient by any means but since it’s only run at level start I figured it doesn’t matter too much).

Tags: C++, level design, procedural, procedural maps, unity

I released my October Challenge game, Ninja Space Pirate, on itch.io today! I made it in Libgdx so I’m planning on publishing the Android version to Google Play by tomorrow.

Hello! Yes we’re running a quick poll to see which weekend is better for Ludum Dare 28.

Click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/blahblah/viewform

Thanks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 31st, 2013 at 9:17 am and is filed under LD #28. 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.

Hello Guys!

I finally did it! I released a game!

Going back a little. Last year, I wanted to participate in October Challenge. I had just discovered the goodness of Unity3D and was eager to make a nice little game and market it to the mobile platforms. But, as I started working, classes also started and the game went from and idea to a paper and got left in a drawer.

Some time later ( August this year ), I started to make a whack-a-mole game for my nephews, which they liked ( obviously, because they’re kids, and they love to mess with gadgets ). The whack-a-mole game turned out to change its gameplay to a memory game, a tile based memory game. I was working on it, and made a development plan on Trello, so I could really follow it, with deadlines and everything ( which is important to keep the pace going ). So between university, work, and part-time indie development, a month later I had a playable demo and a deadline in mid-september.

After subcontracting friends and unknown guys online, to make me game art and compose music, I had something kinda nice! But i still had to push the release a few weeks, because I couldn’t work all the time I wanted per day.. There were days that I would work 16h or more. After all that, in my daily blog surfing, I came to LD and saw that the October Challenge was up, once more! Good news! I was already in the finishing line, so no excuses this time! Last few weeks, were polishing, fixing bugs, polishing, fixing bugs, play testing, gathering feedback.

Finally I was able to submit the game to Google Play 3 days ago! Yay! And I got 2, $0.99 sales! So technically, I’m good for October Challenge, I’ve made my first dollar. Although I invested more money to be a Android/WP/Apple developer. But now I’m promoting the game so hopefully I’ll get my first positive balance in some weeks. I will also be releasing the game for iOS and Windows Phone in the next 3 weeks.

Here’s a trailer of the game.

Hope you liked it. I hope you also got to make a game and your first dollar.

Here’s a link to Google Play

Please share it with whoever you know, the more the merrier, its hard to get noticed on Google play. Help a indie out 😀

Cheers! 😀

Tags: android, iOS, memtiles, windows phone

Well on the last day of the October Challenge 2013 I have managed to complete the first iteration of my game and publish it to Google Play. There is still so much to do to finish the game that I wanted to make, but I have beaten the goals I set for myself and I am happy with this initial product.

But to finish the contest I need your help! Please go an give my game a try on Google Play today! Postmortem to come. Thanks for your help.

Tags: unity

So I didn’t quite finish it, but if you wanted to try out Space Mines K2013 for the October Challenge check it out by clicking the image below:

Any comments or feedback would be awesome! Thanks for liking my weekly posts about its progress, and good luck with the $1 prize!!

P.S. most good looking pixel art is not mine (except that detailed in my previous blog posts), if I stole your work let me know, I just used an image search to borrow some place holders for a bit. 😉

Hopefully I’ll have some time this weekend for Shark Jam. I’ll try to come up with something nice in Flash.

I already got the idea for the title, and I’ll let you guess.

It’s one word that starts with D, ends with shark.

Tags: mini dl, sharks

Hey guys!

So I basically released the game I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, Orbis, right on time for the October challenge, even if I didn’t initially think I would be entering the October challenge.

I am immensely proud of this game.  It’s a culmination of a lot of the stuff I’ve been learning and teaching myself in the past year I’ve been making games, and it’s far away my best yet.  It also doesn’t hurt that the sounds, done by my friend Colin Zarzour, are also excellent.  If you wanna check it out, the link is here: http://fourthfloorgames.itch.io/orbis.  Anyways, good luck with the competition!

-Taylor Anderson

Mission October completed! So I ended up making some sort of hybrid of a tower defence and op-down shooter game. I think in the end the gameplay is actually half-decent, but I wish I’d had more time to work out some balancing and difficulty issues as well as develop the story a bit and maybe add in some online highscores. I hope some of you guys get the chance to check it out (right HERE) and please let me know what you think if you do!

Cheers guys, and good luck with the shark jam if you’re taking part! (I’ll be sleeping :P)

Play Here.

Tags: October Challenge 2013

This October we decided not to make a game, but to wrap up some of the scripts we use for Unity and release them on the Unity Asset Store. We managed to sell for more than 1$ so I guess I’m sort of participating!

This is not advertisement. Don’t buy them if you don’t need them, this is just to show what I spend my October challenge on.

2D IK Solver:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/11904

This package implements a fast and precise solution for the two-bone inverse kinematic problem in 2D.
Take a look at webplayer demo to get an idea. (source included in the package).

GameObject Lock:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/12228

This utility allows you to lock GameObjects in the scene so that they will not be moved by accident.

I hope everyone’s ready, because november’s upon us, and the shark jam is right next to it!

I did it! I finally did October Challenge!

TapPong

Play Ping Pong live with your friends right on your phone with TapPong!

TapPong is a fun 2-player table tennis game in which each player can swing his paddle by tapping on the screen. Each player’s goal is not to miss the ball, if he did miss the ball the other player gets one point.

In order to start playing tap the screen once to serve the ball and tap again to swing the paddle.

*** Even more fun when playing on a tablet! ***

Exotic musics and sounds by Omri Lahav.

It was a really fun challenge and I finally I understand the whole process of making an applicatio\game from scratch and taking it to the market (more to come ). I made the game using HaXe and OpenFL which made my life really easy, and the graphics were made using Inkscape.

Only the last and important part of the challenge is remaining… making some $$$ 😉

> Check out TapPong on Google Market <

Tags: final, game, haXe, october

Can’t wait to play all these shark themed games! I wonder if anyone will make one that’s not a great white? Or not have a physical shark at all…? Who knows, I’m more worried about making one myself haha. And seeing as Jaws scarred me for life, it’ll be an interesting ride ^^

Tags: mini ld, Mini LD #46, sharkjam

We are Looking forwards to the shark theme… Very good Idea in our craniums! xD

So I changed my Name from jammy12789 to JT-Games our little start-up company. We are so excited about this MINI-LD. We are only 13 so wish us luck. And to the rest of you xD

-JT-Games

Enjoy!

Say hello to Sharkie!. Maybe will he get a better name later on, but here he is.

Thinks are going nicely and easily, I hope I’ll be able to do everything I want to do in 48 hours. I’m trying to do 31 mini-games. I should have submitted this game to last Ludum-Dare whom theme was “10 seconds”, but whatever, I’m having lot of fun.

Love you all, and good luck.

Tags: Love

Just started doing some prototyping for Shark Jam,

I’m so excited for this jam since sharks are my favorite animals.