Hey there,
sadly we won’t be able to finish the game in time for the MiniLD. Real life got in the way big time. This is how far I got on the programming side. Nora hasn’t been able to do any graphics due to illness, so you have to live with my glorious programmer art.
This is a really, really early prototype, just implemented a simple screenshake and some shooting. Also I show off the manipulation of the rate of fire of the weapon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iEIXHmyT3g

All is not wasted, though. We plan to develop this further and hopefully create a nice #1GAM entry out of it.

Cheers and good luck to the rest of you,
Marcus

Tags: GameMaker Studio

To slow?

Hello to all you programmers! I think I might have been a little bit slow this weekend. Honestly I was not, but the idea of the game that had grown in my head got bigger and bigger in such a short time. The last LudumDare I could stay focused on what I really needed. This time some things were just different.

First of all: I forgot an appointment, not any appointment at all, but the birthday party of my grandma. I used that gap of some hours for brainstorming and getting ideas. Which worked very well by the way. This was on saturday. On Friday I already started with the old core-engine of the game “We Rule The World”. The basic concept behind the idea was, to get in control of the whole world by growing your influence all over the world. It looked nice in the first place:

But after some hours of testing I realised, that it was…. more or less…. ugly as hell, and the performance was also not the best. So, my decision to completely turn the style of playing the game was made by me on saturday noon.  The concept of ‘tiny’ triangles that shaped the continents of the world was forgotten quicker than I thought and was replaced by the concept of national capitals influencing the world’s population.

The basic idea

And that’s not all. By the given theme “Conspiracy” I formed a gameplay that felt in my head like a mixture of “pandemic or plague inc” and some sort of realtime strategy game with the mystical charme of  the Bilderberg-group or Rothschilds. The aim of the game should be to gain influence all over the world by installing systems to get in control of the population of each country – or at least enough – let’s say 90% to win the game. Not every system is being liked by every nation. Or do you like surveillance-systems? National capitals should also influence each other by connections between them. Not every nation is connected to others, but if they are, a dangerous cocktail of fast growing connections and wrong trusts starts to run riot.

New style

The new style of the worldmap satisfied me completely. It was simple, not to much effort to get to this result and easy to display in the game itself.

Coordinates & data: hell on earth

The hell on earth is really non-generic data. No wonder they came up with crawlers, searchbots, etc. to get rid of this hell. Really, I lost about 2 or 3 hours by putting some data: Capitalname, Coorinates, Countryname, Population, Density of the Population from wikipedia, in my game. And all I reached was maybe the half of the data I needed for the game. There were still about 150 or more capitals missing.

This was the reason I came to my friend Andrian, also a very clever programmer and data-specialist who had certain experience in writing scripts that can catch data from websites, hyperlinks and their content inclusive. He offered me his help and wrote a script in about an hour which worked perfectly good and could also put the data in the right order and forms! I finally had 212 National Capitals in my game…. but I still missed so much time.

Ideas, concepts, Icons and Texts

I got another helping person, Hamster2K ( Also on twitter @Hamster2k) who helped me very much this evening. We brainstormed about concepts of the gameplay and ingame systems, that would make the game believable and much more realistic in an abstract sense than I planned it to be. Thank you very much for this Hans!

I made Icons for the systems by the given information he searched before and put in the funny, intelligent descriptions of the systems, so that it looks really really nice at the moment.

I don’t want to say, that I give up. Of course I don’t want to. But I think the time might be to short to finish the project with the concentration and abandon it now deserves. I’m still working on it( http://www.twitch.tv/thewhitellama ) I thinik for at least an hour or so until I go to sleep.

The MiniLD was more a practice for me than a competition. Fixed limits of time and an appointment to stick to. It was more a practice to get used to the fast thinking, programming and organising and to get the right feeling for the LudumDare comming in April. But at least: I’ve got a new really really interesting game, that is almost finished to work on. And I got to know some interesting people during the MiniLD. These facts make it hard to say no to the next Ludum Dare 😉

Thanks for taking your time reading this article. I hoped you liked it. If you wan’t to know what happens next, just follow me on twitch or twitter. I will work on it.

The WhiteLlama

Christian Ringshofer

My Entry “Subject #48” is done. I hope you’ll enjoy it .

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=32729

Well it is finished gameplay wise anyway, but I do feel that there is a certain charm to the cubes. For a 48 hour time limit, “Nightmare” is a pretty fun puzzle game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=28788

Finished!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=29302

First Jam that me and my friend have done together (His first jam ever and my second)

This is our attempt. It is a spy thriller in which you infiltrate a supervillain’s volcano base and stop his evil scheme!

It is somewhat unfinished and I think we may have been a little ambitious with what we wanted to do, stuff like the animation took way to long and its still very rough.

It’s very much WIP but give it a go!

CONTROLS:

Movement – Left and Right Arrow Keys
Jump – Up Arrow
Open Grate – Down Arrow
Crouch Toggle – C
Judo Chop – Space
Hide In Shadows – Hold F
Open Doors and Activate Checkpoints – Enter

AIM AND TIPS:

– Infiltrate the base and get to the level exit
– Avoid guards and lasers
– Judo Chop guards to disable if needed
– Use the shadowy doorways to hide in
– Some doors need a keycard
– Hit enter on the red terminals to set as active checkpoint

Tags: miniLD #48

Okay, I admit it, my weekend was hardly MiniLD-centric. I slept normally and did a healthy amount of other things.
The result is a game that doesn’t really follow the theme and has only 10 short levels. But I did try out some things that will be useful for me in the future.

Here is my entry. Windows only:
Link!

Here it is!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/py52jtq0f2ugy3z/miniLD%2048.zip

Ninja Assassin

made by Michael Nickels for the mini ludum dare #48

You are an Assassin who has turned on your former employer.
Your job is to kill his Prime Ministers before they, or their Guards, kill you.
In this game, you are the deceiver!

controls:

W A S D or the ARROW KEYS to move the player
E or V to attack
SHIFT or SPACE to run

Enjoy, and thank you for playing!

Whoops.

I would like to take a moment to talk about my MiniLD #28 project and what went wrong though.

Bakery: Make $ome Dough is “lemonade stand” on steroids. Your bakery is a front for a secret drug operation, and the goal is to make $1,000,000 as fast as possible without getting caught.

Each day the player determines how many of each baked good they produce, as well as the number of narcotics. The baked goods sell automatically, and their sale keeps your disguise level high while also providing small profits. The real excitement and core gameplay revolves around drug sales.

The player must sell the narcotics as subtlety as possible without blowing their cover. Asking a few innocent questions is key to separating buyers from normal customers or undercover detectives. Too much questioning, however, and you end up looking suspicious or losing valuable customers.

So that’s the gist of the game. Why didn’t it get finished?

First and foremost, Unity is simultaneously awesome and the absolute worst sometimes. I encountered a bug with the development environment itself that cost me roughly 4 hours of time on the first day. Given this amount of time I could have made the game functioning on a basic level, however that isn’t the primary reason I held off on submitting. The problem was the game in its current state is not all that compelling.

Most of the gameplay revolves around picking up on subtle clues in the customer dialogue and offering the right item as well as monitoring sales to keep the bakery stocked. That’s alright, but it gets really boring after about a day or two. The dialog system isn’t robust enough to support even 10 minutes of interesting gameplay, and this is simply something that needs a lot of timing and writing.

Secondly, the intensity of the game is currently static. There are many planned features, such as a popularity rating that increases the flow of customers (and consequently makes deals that much riskier!) that would have created interesting challenges and intense moments. I spent way too long wrestling with Unity’s GUI system getting it to function properly to implement these features in a satisfying capacity, and there are dozens of other wishlist features that I knew were totally outside the scope but am nonetheless disappointed to lack.

And finally, it is incredibly poorly organized. The script files right now are a mess of nested functions and switches and variables that piled up due to poor planning. The main script file is an absolute nightmare to read at over 1200 lines and counting. Admittedly this is one of my weak spots as a developer and something I will improve on.

What went right then?

I still believe the core concept is very cool and has a lot of potential to be an intense experience. The graphics aren’t all that bad considering the time that went into them, and I learned a lot more about developing in Unity. It is technically playable in its current state, and there are entertaining moments where the dynamic dialogue system generates some interesting scenarios. I will continue to work on the game in my free time, and hopefully one day I can bring it to everyone in proper form.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: incomplete, MiniLD

Thank you for another MiniLD. It was… a hectic one, but I think my game ended up a success on the whole.

Layers is an adventure game in Twine where you infiltrate a building through your ability to shift between different states of existence.

Right now I feel like I’m never going to make another game, but I know I’ll feel differently when the next compo rolls around.

Submitted the collaboration between bitslap and me for MiniLD48. Entry page is over here or click the screenshot above.

This is the first LD I have done.

When I heard the conspiracy theme, I thought immediately about Eyes Wide Shut, and the mansion orgy scenes.

I will write more later. It was a struggle to find a way to show the pulling interests in a web of people who work with and against each other to achieve power. The game is not perfect, but I’m happy about how it came together, and there are alot of features I’d like to add after the competition.

Play it now, let me know how you like it: https://googledrive.com/host/0B9xDuJO0wZNDcWdNc3dLYi1XTEk/index.html

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=5751

Why:
I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend but after seeing people progress on irc saturday night (especially rxi and bitslap *drool*) i wanted to give it a shot anyways. Since i only got around 24 hours left i settled on a dialog text adventure. Also i wanted to make a narrative based game for quite a while.

How:
As usual i made my entry using C#. Overriding paint events of pictureboxes to render text in a custom fashion, being annoyed by unprecise measuretext methods leaving behind ugly spaces were all part of this. But generally it worked fine. I spend a few hours working on the parser/backend. It is a simple token driven script or markup language.

And it is modable! 😀

Texty text

Example:

:Narrator
 #narration This text will be describtive about the character you're talking to. Also the Narrator has to exist. it is the fallback 'person' when you end a dialog. the #narration keyword is mandatory, but will be ignored for the Narrator.
 #intro The "hello" text of the character. #intro is a [keyword]
 #keyword is a reply to a keyword determined in [brackets]
 #brackets Keywords in brackets will automatically be added as soon as you read them. You can also learn of [persons] that way.
 #persons will be identified by (Paran Thesis). To talk to another person, you have to [end] the conversation.
 #end will end the conversation
 
 :Paran Thesis
 #narration She has an round body and is generally nice and [helpful].
 #intro Hello there, what can i do for you?
 #helpful Do you want some [food] or [drinks]?
 #food Here, have some pie!
 #drinks Have a beer!
 #end Goodbye.

Open the “Dialog” file residing next to the .exe in a texteditor and paste the markup text above (play the game before that if you don’t want to get spoiled) and create your own dialog adventure! 😀

3 things though:
1. remember that #narration, #intro and #end are mandatory keywords.
2. remember that every keyword needs text
3. the win/end condition is currently hardcoded, so sorry about that, but feel free to look at the source

Furthermore, if you are interested in more features like conditional replies (yes/no), location based persons/traveling, character-bound keywords and possibly more puzzle features, leave a comment or come discuss in irc or twitter.

Lastly, there is no error handling as of yet, so if your script doesn’t work, the .exe will just crash.

Have fun adventuring! And paste your own adventures aswell 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=5751

i finally finished and submitted my entry! today was a rough day, but i suppose it was worth it. i have a somewhat finished game sort of thing now. hope you’ll enjoy.

here’s the final build: RubikBox (Web)

also, few comments worth noting:
– the game is solely rhythm-based, i.e. audio is essential to play.
– i’m afraid game controls doesn’t seem to be as intuitive as i thought of, so it might take some time to get used to the mechanics.
– i didn’t really have time to optimize the code, it should (hopefully?) run smoothly on most computers though.
– all in all, i guess i got a bit experimental on the game, nonetheless, i reeally enjoyed making it!

cheers.

So, yeah, Rogue Rush did #95 overall and we were really proud of it (especially for a first game). Guess beginners’ luck ran out, because this one is really not as good.

Well, I was pretty much alone, so it’s a given I could not produce as much as a 3 persons team, but I’m really not satisfied with myself, especially for the windows version which is plagued of bugs (and even an almost game breaking one, depending of your mouse)…

If you can find time to test it, please give me your feeling on what went wrong (beside my poor English).

Finally made it to the other side, and I couldn’t be more thrilled(although exhausted).

Stop the Spy is finally finished, a kind of strategy-subterfuge, examine-the-intel type of game. It’s fairly simple in it’s concept, but it came together rather well. This was my first jam experience, and only the third game I’ve ever completed, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. What I found was working harder than I’ve ever need to on a weekend, and loving every minute of it. So thank you to the LD community for that.

Check out Stop the Spy here if you have the chance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sleep for days.

Hello everyone, and welcome to day Two of my Ludum Dare Game Development. This is for Mini Ludum Dare 48. I am developing a game called Death Plot. You can read about it here. Anyway, today (Technically yesterday, I am writing it a day late.) was a very unproductive day. Today was the first day that I had Sebastian Benjamin in the room with me, and we both did awful. All I managed to do is as follows:

• I streamed on my Twitch Channel (uploaded to YouTube now (or soon, depending on when you read this))
• I re-implemented GameStateManagement, because the previous implementation was very bad. It was far too complex, and was creating way too many bugs. I decided to use a simpler Enum and Switch based one.
• I fixed and introduced various bugs
• I implemented a very buggy version of player bullets. Now one of the players shoots, but it is in the wrong start position, and goes the wrong direction.

I can tell you, seeing as I am writing this Day two blog on Day three, that things go much better on day three.
You can follow my Ludum Dare blogs on: www.ictuateanomaly.blogspot.com or twitter.com/Kerinova_xeon

Note: Sebastian’s Perspective of Day 1, 2, and 3.

For roughly the last 6 hours, me and Xeon have been hacking and badly programming our way through Death Plot for LD47.

A few statistics-
I’ve made-

-1 song, not including the one I made yesterday

-3 sound effects

-10 sprites/icons

-1 score system
Now, the score system *was* going to be based off of a float = GameTime kind of setup, but it was lagging the game and causing all kinds of strange issues with explicit casting. In the end, I decided to axe that system in favor of an int that += 1 every frame, because it didn’t lag out and break everything.
I forgot what caused me to do the math on the issues with ints and casting to longs, but here it is-
You can play the game for

2,147,483,647  frames,

71582788.2333 seconds,

1193046.47056 minutes,

19884.1078427 hours,

828.504493446 days,

118.357784778 weeks,

and 2.26987532451 years, before it crashes due to the number being larger than the int can hold (on a 32 bit system).

Meanwhile, Xeon’s been hard at work fixing all the bugs in the universe, and is even now swearing under his breath at the monitor.
The game is in it’s final stretches, and all that’s left to implement are the enemies and extra features such as an options menu.

Hi there,

This was my first Mini LD entry and I am now confused.

How do we actually vote for someone’s game? Is voting open yet for MiniLD48?

Please advise?

I woke up in the afternoon on Saturday, and decided I’m just too lazy to work on miniLD this time. The original idea I had would take too long to make anyway. Instead I just kept working on my post-jam and tried out what people have done for miniLD 48.

There’s quite a lot of interesting ones actually, it helps fill up the time during newgrounds’ downtime. For some, I don’t quite get how they connect with the themes, but the entries I’ve played are quite entertaining. Seems like you guys put a lot of work in it.

It’s nice to actually play some games and don’t feel like I have to vote. Sometimes voting seems like work, but for miniLD I can just play around and comment on interesting games.

So I finished my 48hr version and I will definitely be finishing this game off in the next week or so. I learned a nice amount about AI programming and animation in Unity2D.  The basic game mechanics were really nice. I’m very happy with the controls of the player and how the animations play out. The AI on the other hand, wasn’t completely finished. The Security guard’s isn’t finished and is kind of pointless. But I just threw him in as I spent so long drawing him.  Also I never got around to doing background or ground textures until the last minute.  if you are finding it too hard its because I made the players life very small because the game is extremely short and adding difficulty makes it a bit longer, the full game will have much more life than in this version.

Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=27122

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DogecoinGame