I have re-created the whole design of the game but the game is still in development!

Pokémon Drench is a fan made Pokémon game where you explore the region of BzrkTopia (WIP) and find new Pokémon for Professor Oak. The aim is to find all the new WATER Pokémon in the game. In the series, Pokémon Ember and Bush allow you to find new FIRE and GRASS type Pokémon respectively.

Leave comments here please!

My Site: bzrkplayingminecraft.tk

YT Channel: BzrkPlayingMinecraft / BzrkPlaying SomeGames

After a relaxing night’s sleep, some Thanksgiving leftovers, and a couple YouTube videos to wake up with, I’m back to work! While checking the new posts for this mini-LD, I came across this particular post, which posted a video about motivation.

Now, I, personally, often have trouble keeping myself motivated. I tend to want to go do something else, like watching YouTube videos, playing a game, chatting on Skype, etc. and it’s been a bane to my productivity for many years. In the interest of giving the aforementioned video’s suggestions a try, I’m going to set out a clear list of things that I must get done today and organize them into “modules” so I can see the progress I’ve made. I’ll be editing this post to update my list as I work.

Major Goals

• Mobile Controls – 100%
  Mostly complete, and much simpler than expected, thanks GM’s point_direction function. Still need to test it on a mobile device with someone to see how intuitive the controls are.

  Update: Complete, with press-dragging to move the blocks and tapping to create balls or change ball colors, if a ball already exists on the playfield. It’s actually very intuitive on a mobile device, which is pleasing.

• Lives – 100%
  This was one of the shorter, simpler tasks. The heart is resized based on a global lives variable and is destroyed when the lives are set to 0, which also serves to lock out any controls but a simple tap, which resets the stage.
• Ball Color Checking – 100%
  I underestimated the work involved in “Bouncing Ball,” so I’ve split it into two categories, now. Collisions work, with balls correctly changing the colors of the blocks they hit, but I don’t have any bouncing code implemented as of yet. It may prove to be complicated, and I’m not exactly sure how I will implement it. I’ll ponder it while I take a break.
• Bouncing Ball – 100%
  Finally managed to get this implemented. Not only did decent bouncing take a while (and it could use some work, but it’s serviceable), but I came across a number of other things that needed tweaking and fixing in the process. There’s still one bug that I can’t reliably replicate that strikes almost at random, seemingly only when a blue ball hits an orange block, but only on occasion. I hate loose ends.
• Level Progression – 100%
  This task was fairly simple, and I took advantage of GM’s defaulting unspecified array values to 0 to my advantage to cut down a tad on how huge the level array will be, at least in code. Now to type out the levels, which should be fairly simple–it’s just a bunch of copy-pasta.
• Implement Levels – 100%
  There are currently 22 levels implemented, with plenty of room for more. My level system is pretty flexible, allowing me to specify how many rings there are (I’ve set up the rings in a switch case statement so that they’re rendered in a certain order), which colors the heart progresses to (a necessary control for the earlier tutorial levels), and what the odds are of each of the eight possible colors spawning. It worked out quite well, and I could easily add more levels that have different color spawning odds, but I’ll probably leave it at 22.

Stretch Goals

• Score Implementation – 100%
  The current score is rendered on-screen, just above the heart, as in the original Unity3D version of the game. I had to look up how to make it always display zeroes to the left of the score, but in hindsight, it’s something I should have figured out, myself.
• Scanline Effect
• Sound Effects

Time to put on a game soundtrack and get to it. On a related note, while Hotline Miami has an awesome soundtrack in the game itself, it doesn’t make for good listening on its own. FTL and Super Meat Boy are great to just listen to, though. If you can think of some others, let me know.

Tags: journal, to do

My first game ever was Ludum Dare 25: Ethan’s Bike,  which I LOVED making.

You are playing as Ethan, a little 6 year old boy who wants
to buy a brand new bike! However, he has no money! To make things worse, the bike
is off store shelves in just 15 days! Be villianous and steal from you neighbors!

I plan to redo the whole game and apply everything I learned to make the game a little better in my eyes. Goals are:

• Make it less interface-based.
• Make it so it takes a little strategy to steal things.
• Have fun revisiting Ethan

Good luck to all for this mini-LD!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18002

It’s quite hard for me to nail down the first game I have ever made, but I think if you ignore altering game listings and modifications you arrive at my fireworks game – where you were a flying character dangerously near a fireworks display.

Rockets rose from bottom of the screen, exploded into a bullet pattern, and you had to dodge it while catching the extinguished firework. Perhaps my logic was you were using your levitating powers to stop cardboard tubes giving someone a nasty bonk on the head, although in reality I imagine they burn up quite sharpish.

I no longer have the original version, which was coded badly in C++ and SDL, but I do remember it was infinite and had 4 modes: normal, normal deterministic, ultra and ultra-deterministic. I kind of wish I still had the Esp.Ra.De inspired character sprite.

For its modern reconstruction I’m focusing on a difficult two minute survival mode and there will be randomness to how the level is generated. Currently there is no catching and I think I will keep it that way. Above is everything I have so far with some placeholder art (the character is from Touhou 10 and totally not mine, will change!). Tomorrow I will do everything I haven’t done already.

I knocked them together for my own use and figured other people might want to use them. Nothing special but you won’t have to do it yourself if you don’t want to. Here you go.

I’m very pleased with where things are right now. Considering that much of yesterday was spent with family after Thanksgiving, I got started late today, and I took frequent, long breaks, I couldn’t be happier that the core game is basically completed after about 12 hours or so of actual work. It’s good to know that the game could be made and work well within a Game Jam’s time period, no problem. Take that, guys who said that Heartbreak couldn’t be made in GameMaker!

I’ve been keeping an ongoing list of my progress throughout the day, and I feel that having the work in a checklist aided in my productivity and concentration. I’ll have to practice this sort of thing more in the future.

Heartbreak, as of tonight

That leaves things like sound effects and music for tomorrow, but at least those should be fairly simple to do. There is an abundance of great music available on the ‘net, and I may simply record my sound effects from the Atari 2600 version of Heartbreak to use again, as they are perfectly serviceable and I would be looking for something similarly retro-synth-sounding, anyway.

I’d also like to experiment with different visual styles, such as a grungy pixel art look and/or some scanlines. Something so that the visuals are so overly smooth and clean. That said, I do like the pastel colors that I’ve settled on, and it all looks pretty slick on my phone. I’ll have to experiment tomorrow and see what I like.

In any case, I consider the mini-LD technically complete as of now, since the gameplay is implemented and fully functional. The only nagging point is a crashing bug that I experienced a few times that I’ve been unable to replicate and track down. Here’s hoping that it got smoothed out somewhere and doesn’t rear its ugly head. Or, if it does rear its ugly head, hopefully it rears it high enough that I can find the neck and give it a good chop.

That’s it for me tonight. Time to wind down!

P.S. Is it just me, or does the above screenshot have a bit of an optical illusion going on with the blue block on the far right? Try turning your head back and forth and looking at it out of the corner of your eye. To me, it’s like the blue block separates away from the rest of the circle.

Tags: game progress, GameMaker Studio, journal, mobile

Day 2 for me is coming to an end, I would like to be farther along, but I’m not. I continued from where I left off last night, with a working level generation, I completed that…then 6 hours later realized that I did it “wrong”. It was working correctly, but there was a better and more efficient way to do it. So I deleted what I had, and redid it. Next was to get the basic player movement in, that is simple in Construct 2. The problem arose from the collision mask that Construct 2 generated. The generated masks were very inaccurate and upon inspection, some were just wild. I just completed realigning all of the collision masks, and I’m going to call it done for the night.

The screenshot above shows the Starting screen, with the Play window open (well it doesn’t close yet). Inside the Play window you can either click on one of the complexity levels to use a preset level generation, or you can make you own by inputting numbers.

Tomorrows goals are to get the color selecting in, as well as the Abilities and Traits and with any luck scoring. A bonus if I had time would be music, leaderboard integration into the website, sound effects, mobile controls, and just about anything else you can think of.

Hi! I am Job(AKA joppiesaus), and I am going to join the LD competition!

I am new to the Ludum Dare competition, and I think I will join the LD 28.
I will do something in C#, probably in XNA. Now here’s the bad news:
The competition starts at saturday, 3 AM for my timezone. I have to plan awsome, otherwise I’ll end up nowhere.
Backwars too, the competiton ends at monday, 3 AM.
But! When the competition starts, the theme is not revealed, that’s in two hours, right? I just set my alarm clock at 5 AM, and I am happy!

Also, I am not a very experienced programmer… I am not old, and I learned everything from the internet, and never had study. I only made some derp games, not very special stuff. Next year, I am going to ‘programming’ class. But I think I can do it! It is afterall a game jam.

But! I’ll enjoy the whole competition(I should be more carefull with my words…)!
Conclusion: I’m in!

Hey everyone,

So this past week I’ve been taking part in The Charity Game Jam and since I had no time to make something new (because of work and other stuff), I decided to do a slightly tweaked “Turbo” (read: Post-Jam) version of my old Ludum Dare 26 Game Only One Shot with some changes based on the feedback I got back in April such as slightly faster player movement as well as four additional levels.

“Turbo” version of my game

Original version of my game

Download Turbo Version (Standalone EXE for Windows)

Play Turbo Version Online (HTML5)

Entry Page for Original Version

Post-Mortem for Original Version

Tags: Charity, Charity Button Challenge, Charity Game Jam, charitygamejam, post-jam, xna

This time it’s not really recovering. Because I’ll make graphics, and I can’t say I could make good graphics before. So,

————— Relearning graphics —————

At first, I made a to-do list for graphics:

• Color scheme. I thought about making gray platforms, black void as walls, and gray fog for undiscovered territories. Quiet moody.
• Make player. You see it at 45 degrees, it can rotate in 4 directions.
• If possible, make walking anomation for player.
• Switches. It shouldn’t be difficult.
• Orbs (aka exits). Little black balls with smaller white balls orbiting them.
• Fog. Grey tiles which fade away as you discover them.
• Make some kind of tutorial. Text messages that will appear as you play.
• Main menu and stuff.

(Hey, where did the spelling check button go?)

The color scheme looked nice, but the fog was kinda bad, so I started from the fog. I decided to make the fog like that: initially, all undiscovered tiles are gray. But when I discover them, as I can’t just interpolate then to whatever I want, I switch them instatly and at the same time add a new fog tile, which will fade away with time.

Here comes the fog!

Wow, it looks cool. Well, let’s go on.

Next things I made were switches and orbs. I made both of them animated, and it was very interesting to do.

I like those animations)

Let’s make a player then! I imagine him knida squared (cubed?). After several minutes I managed to finish him. (Finish him!).

The player

Why does he look like that? Idk, I just wanted so.

I didn’t animate him. Because my code is like cuonmoppltiicmaitzeedd. So, I finished graphics. Yay! Have a screenshot:

Done!

I decided to leave music for now and make some menus. And come up with a name of the game! So, here is an another to-do list I made:

• Make a tutorial.
• Come up with a name.
• Make a menu.
• Make an “you win” screen.

Eventually, I didn’t make an “you win” screen. But I made some cool effects, and discovered some in the program I use. Nice!

By the way, the name I chose is “By the Void”.

Now the game is pretty much complete. Except it’s missing some atmospheric music.

————— Relearning composing —————

Abundant Music still doesn’t have any export excepting to midi. Sad…

*Lookes (Listens?) through previously generated music* Bad luck… Nothing suitable…

Well, actually, there is some a bit suitable music, but generating is too easy! And I’m here to warm up my skills! So, let’s compose some music ourselves!

It didn’t took me long, but hey, I just made a 16-second loop!

And then, an usual problem: converting WAV to MP3. I use Audacity, and when it converts, it leave a little pause at the begining. Eek! It ruines the rhythm when looped! Well, the solution I know is to chop off the end of the track, so the length remains the same. But you can still feel the bump. If anyone knows a solution, please tell me.

————— Results —————

What went good:

• I finished it in time!
• I made some good graphics!
• I made (I think) the game moody.

What went wrong:

• Code. I even had some problems with it’s entanglement.
• I spent 48 hours, but made only one level. Well, I wasn’t really trying, but I need some serious warm-up to make it in time in December!
• The game isn’t very challenging. Well, the idea is years old.

Go play it!

First off, to anyone reading this–when exactly does today’s LD end? Is it at a specific time, or just midnight, relative to whomever is doing the dare?

Last day. I’m fortunate that my game happens to be significantly less complicated than everyone else’s, so I have the luxury of effectively being finished, then having an entire day to polish things up. The downside is that I’ve decently recreated everything that I’d intended, so I’m not quite sure on what direction to go with said polishing, aside from the inclusion of music and sound effects. I suppose that’s part of the learning experience.

Major Goals

• Sound Effects – 100%
  I expect that I’ll just use the sound effects created for the Atari 2600 version, since they’ll be simple to acquire and appropriate for the retro-inspired style I had intended.
  UPDATE: I’ve got some sound effects in, most of them simply recorded from the 2600 version of Heartbreak, though I generated a couple with DrPetter’s awesome SFXr, made for LudumDare participants, as it so happens. The sounds that I chose aren’t particularly great, but sound engineering is something I have zero experience in. May be a field worth learning more about for the future, particularly if I intend to keep participating in dares like this.
• Title Screen – 100%
  This took the longest. I’ve been working on the title/credits screens for half the day. My desire to make things as “neat” as possible has resulted in an absolute mess of code all over the place as the entire game only uses three rooms, one that only initializes two variables before kicking the player to the title screen, and one that just scrolls credits on screen, since it seemed easier to use a unique room than to modify an existing room. The remaining room handles all levels and the title screen based on what global.level is set to. It’s both elegant, and an absolute mess.
• Music Integration – 100%
  This went off fairly well, especially since the songs I’m using from incompetech.com list the BPMs of the songs, making it a lot easier to make them feel integrated. In hindsight, there is a song for the last three levels of the game that may be almost unfairly fast, which causes the heartbeat to be nearly too quick to get the color you want, so you have to anticipate it. Ah, well–I’m sure that anyone who can make it to that level will be able to handle it.

Polish Goals

• Pixel Grunge Style?
• Scanlines?

UPDATE: After some research, it seems that most of the effects like noise or scanlines are done using surfaces, which I know nothing about. I’ll definitely be looking into them in the future, but since I’m on a deadline with this LD, I think I’ll stick with the crisp, clean style that I’ve currently got. Besides, I have a couple other ideas on how I may polish things.

Time to get to it.

Tags: journal, to do

This morning was spent working on the Traits and Ability in the game, as well as selecting colors. Now by selecting a color you can take on the trait or ability that the color has, as well as travel through the color you have selected.

I’m submitting the game now, not because its done, but because I’m not sure if I will have time later. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-47/?action=preview&uid=3966

Provided I have time, I will be adding music, sound, scoring, and leaderboards. I would also like to add some how to play information.

Well, v0.1 is complete, anyway. Considering how much stuff I had in mind when I began this LD which didn’t come to fruition, I hesitate to call it a full-fledged 1.0, but it’s working, and (as far as I can tell) stable.

I’m pleased with the final result, overall. It could definitely use some polishing and expanding, but for two and a half days spent making what is essentially my first non-2600 game? It could certainly have been worse!

My only real disappointment is that I don’t know how to dynamically make the game fit across multiple mobile device screens. The linked version is sized for a Droid RAZR HD, since that’s the phone I’ve got. Once I figure out how to make a version that scales automatically for different phone resolutions, I’ll make sure to post it. Until then, give the Windows version a shot if you don’t have a RAZR. Controls are mouse clicks and drags, since it’s the same control scheme as the tapping/flicking gestures of the mobile version.

Heartbreak’s Title Screen

Submission Page
Windows Download
Android Download

For those curious, you can play the original game, made for the 2013 Game Jam in Unity3D, here, and my remake for the Atari 2600 (included in a compilation ROM of other small games I made) here. The latter will need an emulator such as Stella.

This has been an excellent learning experience. I’m going to enjoy a little break, but then I hope to keep working on learning more to improve what I can do, whether with programming, art design, or sound design, since there is serious room for improvement in all of them.

Tags: arcade, atari 2600, breakout, gamemaker, heartbreak, journal, mobile, postmortem, unity3d

Well, I managed to miss the October Challenge completely, but I kept working away on the further development to my MiniLD #37 (yeah, way back) entry “Stargazing” into November. The theme of the original MiniLD was “Not game”, and indeed Stargazing is a bit of a curiosity. You connect stars to make constellations while progressing through a story covering brief moments in the life of a couple. Pocket Gamer kindly wrote a little thing about it! Which was nice.

The game went live on the App Store and Google Play last Thursday. Naturally I must share this news with the community that is the reason the game ever came to be! Let me scatter some links below a screenshot for those who are curious

More info at the game’s page on my site: http://paulsburgess.co.uk/stargazing/

Tags: android, iOS, unity

It’s Slaughter Time!

All this week, help us reduce the thousands of themes submitted to a more manageable size using our patent pending (not really) Sosowski hot-or-not slaughtering technology. Also, my thanks again to Sorceress for helping out.

Theme Voting begins this weekend!

Blue Bloke Turbo, previously called There’s a hook is now finished and free.

More screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/7zDcg

Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfgsbms064v01ct/Blue%20Bloke%20Turbo.zip

Okay. Ludum dare 28 is coming soon, and i finish my game ^_^

It’s completed mobile game. Written on html5, compiled by ludei.com

Some art ordered from freelancer.

I will be happy, if you download my game, and may be rate it ^_^

This is very funny arcade game.
Postal service simulator.
In this game you can feel as a longshoreman postal service.
Immerse the parcels on the trucks in the allotted time, use the bonuses and make combos!
Mail never stops!

Tags: successtory

Hey Everyone,

Livestreaming Dev on a Dungeon Crawler MMO my partner Knotfolds and I have put a lot of work into. If you’d like Pre-Alpha Access, come check us out @ Twitch.tv/0Creds

Thanks,

– 0Creds

My finished entry for the Charity Game Jam is an HTML5 puzzle-type game based on everyone’s favorite emotes. =)

It was created to support Operation Smile, which provides surgery to children born with certain facial deformities.

Please play, share, and if possible… donate!

Play Super Smile Factory

Tags: charitygamejam

I initiated my brother-in-law to game jamming today with a 10 hour game jam.
He made graphics and sfx with bfxr while I programmed. I was surprised that he had the discipline and will to complete every task I asked for immediately.

This was our creation…

Sorry, it’s not politically correct..

Click here to play.

Keyboard controls:.
W -Jump, A,D – Move, J – Shoot