Our character can walk.

Our game has static camera position.

Our shader has affine textures.

Our shader can give rounding errors to vertices.

Our game feels and looks like Resident Evil 1 on Playstation One.

Next our texture artist will start replacing my placeholder textures, our shader progarmmers tries to get dithering working, animator makes more animations, AI coder sleeps and I will continue modelling the world.

Hello all!

I forgot to post yesterday that I was joining in on all the fun for this LD. Anyway, so yes I am in! I didn’t vote on the theme this time around because I usually get too excited for a theme and start thinking of ideas for it and then it isn’t picked. So this time I just relaxed and let fate decide. I am, however, excited for this LD’s theme!

Here are my tools:

1) Unity – Free Version (trying my luck with Unity this time around)

2) Notebook for ideas

3) My brain

Good luck to everyone! I can’t wait to play your games!

So, I am thinking about making my game both 2D and 3D. I will have space travel (From one planet/asteroid to another (The textures will stay in 64×64 format, which is what all graphics in my game will be)), be 3D, and still allow mining on those planets/asteroids in 2D. Any opinions on this? It seems like a good idea, but I am still not quite sure on whether or not I should do it…

Even though the theme is really good in my opinion, I had a hard time integrating it in my game ideas. I wanted to make a turn based strategy game, as I didn’t manage to make one during my last ludum dare (LD27). So I kind of forced it in there…

The Idea: You are a king. You are in war with other kingdoms. To finance their troops, all kingdoms try to control as many gold mines as possible (Yea… mines… thats the theme… :-/ ). The goal is to eliminate all other kingdoms.

The basic game mechanics for turns and movements are in place. But my todo list is still very long. I hope I’m able to finish a somewhat playable game.

Edit: Oh, and here is my repository: https://github.com/knied/LD29

Current status. All the shapes are generated in code :)

Put as much time as I thought I could spare into creating the little characters.

I got some blood in. I’m having way too much fun with this! 😀

Joe the Squid is going to have his work cut-out for him.

Tags: spermaceti

The game is finally taking shape. Here is a screenshot of an early concept. The game will be divided in levels and we have 3 of them done. There are still several sprites to be made and music to be composed, so lots of work ahead!

We are also working on the physics of some objects (which are not behaving as they should) and finishing the last levels.

For reference, we are using:

– Construct 2 as framework.

– Box2D as physics engine.

– Paint .NET and a Microsoft Surface for the drawing.

– Adobe Photoshop CS5 for image editing.

Early concept of the game.

Walking animation for our heroine.

Now… time for some monsteeeeers 😀

time to get my arse down and finish this section:) Hope everyone’s is going as good as they look on the blog:)

SEN0RDIABL0

Learned quite a bit from the last 2 solo attempts. This is going to be clean and by the books .. I’ll be using Unity3d, Audacity, and Inkscape. See you later!

Hi guys,

for now it’s been an amazing #LD48 for us in Switzerland!

here are our progress of the day! tomorrow will be all about our secret combat system 😀 Can’t wait to show you the results!

I started my game and I don’t hate it, but I wasted the morning going a puzzle route but…that’s just not me, at least not this type of puzzle, slow jigsaw puzzles.  I’m more of a twitch player.  I have two mechanics I want, and  I’m trying to devise an interesting way to use them both with only single button mouse clicking.  Also, I tried out Substance Painter today; it’s a cool program but not 100% what I’m looking for, at least not yet and not for this.  I’ll stick to Photoshop for now.  I’m going for a walk to clear my head and when I get back I’m going to either figure out how to do these mechanics properly or start character work…

Like always, I’m starting super late. Here’s my current main menu screen. Unfortunately, I’m still unsure what the game will be about 😛

Main Menu animation

Now with saving, improved graphics, and other doodads!

Next up: Sounds (some totally radical voice acting?), music, easter eggs, and polishing. Maybe some more gameplay features, if I think of any.

This how it can look like if you screw around with the changable properties in my game : )

Haven’t really had as much time to work on my entry as I would have liked. Here’s what I have so far. I’m aiming for a “Missle Command with a story” kinda vibe.

So, here is my progress so far:

All of the graphics bar from the red ‘squid’ are place holder. All I need to do no wis add a objective.

As it turns out, creating a rigid body physics system from scratch during a 48-hour game jam is not such a great idea.

My idea stars a prospector on the frontier, who slips and falls into deep chasm. He survives, but has to climb out. To do this, you control the limbs of the climber, dragging them from hold to hold. Ideally the game would calculate how much strain each limb was under, and he could lose grip and fall again. I picked this one because (so I thought) it was the simplest of the ideas I had come up with. Here’s the art I did for it. Ignore his missing limbs, they would just be mirrored in the game.

Unfortunately, Flaxen (my base code) doesn’t handle hierarchical transformations, let alone joints and rigid body constraints. I’ve wasted hours today just getting a positional transform to cascade, but this is worthless without also handling rotation. (And scale? Fuhgeddaboudit!) I’m feeling stupid for even trying.

So at this point, I’m going to do a cursory search for some rigid body physics libraries for Haxe, but it seems unlikely I’ll find anything that will integrate quickly with my library Flaxen, let alone the dependent libraries of Ash and HaxePunk. Then I’ve gotta decide if there’s enough time for a plan B, or do I just call up my friends and say never mind, I’m coming with you.

So I got the Vias working…

And now, a fancy diagram of what those animated tiles (Via) are:

Small I know, sorry… 😛

Basically the red lines are different levels, the blue is a Via that goes down a level and the green is a Via that goes up a level.

Well, everyone, I’m back for another year.  I’ve got a slightly different team (one of my roommates from college will be doing the graphics assets instead of my brother, and I still don’t know who’s gonna do audio).  But yea… this seems familiar.

More time doing UI coding, but I’m back to making the render code.  This time the render is a little more complex and dynamic than before, but it’s based on the same concepts that my previous Ludum Dare entry was built on.  Hopefully, I can get this rendering code together tonight so that I’m at least rendering before the morning.  That’ll leave the last two days for implementation of this games specific features, character control, mob AI (yup! this time you’ll have something to compete against), music creation (if it’s not done sooner), and art asset polishing.

So I’m off to Dinner and I’ll be back to coding again around 5 DST.  Ciao for now!

Having had a good sleep I discovered that after an hour with Unity my plan wasn’t going to work. Plan B activated!

Also instead of Unity, I went to good old Three.JS. It might do a lot less for you in terms of games but you get post-processing effects, Blender imports and it’s all in the language I use every day anyway.

Currently working on getting the right look and all my modelling in Blender done. I *should* be working on the gameplay but that’s the bit I’m less worried about. Here’s a Vine of my progress so far!

Tags: first progress, ld48, three.js

A little bit of progress, not exactly how I wanted it to look but as of now it’s going good!  Have to add in some actions, basic AI, and better random level generation, along with better graphics and more!

Just the basics are done…gotta add more!

Unnamed game with a given theme: Beneath the Surface. Currently we just finished brainstorming and after a few ideas later, our minds clashed and gave birth to a game.

This is what it looks like currently:

I currently don’t have too much time to talk about it. And I will probably post another update 5 hours from now with a playable build…

By the way, I think this is a game development process that is worth looking at, because John and I have been making games independently for a while, and we finally decided to team up. He’s the founder of Ironzilla, and I founded dCoye Interactive. Our past games have been recognized by the Electronic Software Association, VentureBeat, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, MTV Networks, and many more.

See you guys in 5 hours! In the meantime, John and I will tweet about our frustration on Twitter.

I’d love to hear about your interpretation of the whiteboard drawing in the comments or Twitter! (John and I will try to respond :P)

First time Ludum Dare, first time working together in a group.

Together we worked out an rather complex idea and started working on it ( We are using Java with Slick2D),
but after 4 hours we still had nothing working and soon began too realize that we need to tune down
our plans a bit.

Nothing special, nothing beautiful, but it works and we surely want to make something special out of it!

My apologies for the low quality of the screenshot.

Here are some interesting notes aboot my game.

The game’s name is SubSpace and it takes place in the basement of a crypt. The gameplay involves navigating a maze, well at least at first but then, sometime into the game the player will encounter a device that allows him/her to travel to subspace. After the discovery of this item, the player will navigate through the maze and its inter dimensional counterpart, using both to progress through the maze…….

I’m pretty happy with the result after the first day.
You can move the mole.
The mole can’t move outside of the screen or above the ground.
The mole can eat the earthworms.
The mole can collide with the rocks.
The mole can breath air.

Still have to add sounds and other stuff for it to feel like a whole game.

Nomnomnom, there is no place like home nomnomnom.

it’s starting to look like a game … nomnomnom

Stuff, I’ve done stuff!

There is a game mechanic working and the setup is good enough that I can change most things pretty quickly. But there’s still an ENORMOUS amount of work to do.
And I realised something a few minutes ago: “yes probably noone else will have a game like mine: but there’s a good reason for it:  it’s too difficult and not enough fun”.
But it’s too soon to despair.

Tomorrow: game flow, music, sound, starting screens, buttons, more graphics. Oh and a story, which the game really needs.

But you can’t polish a turd :D, so there’s not much use to extend to the Jam deadline. I’ll leave it as it is at the Compo deadline.

And a screenshot:

It will be less ugly, I promise!

Luckily we don’t have to deal with a giant moon crashing into the planet.

It’s my first ludum dare entry, and I just passed 12 hours of development!

Anyway, here’s some screenshots of the progress…

This screenshot shows the game in it’s current state.

This is the concept for the completed game![Was drawn about 6 hours after beginning the project]

Yeah, there will be a bit of blood in this game. Was going to insert blood through the use of particle effects, so that I could have an option to “tone down the violence” with the blood level, but then I just thought: screw it!

For only learning how to program for around 6 months, it looks like I’ve done alright so far. All the other projects look so awesome, can’t wait to see more!

Tomorrow: adding sound, fixing main game mechanic, adding menus, scoring, end screen, and a ton of other things!

So, I made a stupid decision. I decided to enter the competition the same weekend Dark Souls II was released, and I have realized that I have wasted too much time playing instead of working on the game.

So I have decided to “downgrade” to jam and use my pre existing 2D engine (with z-buffer and lighting, woho!).

Screenshot of the engine

Thought I’d make a blog post for a break. My control scheme works fairly well (thought it’s pretty basic.) The controls are touchy and because they’re physics-based, you can get out of control pretty easily. However, I feel like this adds to the game because you are supposed to be commanding an unmanned submersible. There are a lot of clipping issues, which I will try to fix after everything else is done, otherwise I’ll run out of time for everything.

Here’s a shot of all of the underwater caverns you get to explore:

So for the past few hours I’ve been tweaking my physics system. Each pixel of the world is interactable, so each pixel needs to collide with the player. I can handle that, but resolving collisions is becoming increasingly difficult to control. In a completely flat collision, everything is fine. When two start happening at once, the player is moved from one even deeper into the other, that other one then causes another and just shoots the player through the ground until there are absolutely no more collisions to handle. There’s no easy way around that… Does anyone here have any experience in detailed ‘physics’ like this that they can share? Would be much appreciated ^_^

Screenshot of what the world looks like:

Here is the first look at our game, its going a lot slower than planned because we’ve hardly been able to work on it :/ luckily now it appears like we will have the rest of the weekend :D. The general idea is that you are an earth god or spirit that is part of / lives under the surface and you must nurture(or hinder) the development of this small tribe.

p.s. I promise it will look better.

Well, since yesterday, things have been progressing. Not really fast, but considering some *things* it’s not that bad.

This is today’s progress so far:

• AI for a snake. It will be used as base for other more complex enemy AIs (not super-duper complex but anyway, I’m still pretty bad at platformers).
• Added sounds and the first area music.
• Added introductory text, title screen and death. The snake can kill you, yay! And you can kill her, awwwww…
• You can dig holes, tile-based style. Not going to ever bother with pixel-perfect destructible environments, sorry!
• The first area is done.

Things to finish up today:

• 1 or 2 more enemy kinds.
• Health recovery item.
• Second area.

Lastly, here some screenshots.

And that’s it for the moment.

Spelunker Boxing is about halfway done. Still got a lot of polishing to do on the menus and HUD, plus there’s AI to think about. By the way, this game would probably be really fun online, but sadly there’s not enough time.

Picking three different movement mechanics was not smart for a gamejam. Just need to polish it up and then I can actually add the gameplay :p

We can’t really stop playing the game after we started testing… Oh well, just a few more enemies.

Read Devlog #1 here.

Alright. Its not only pretty waves and nice blue colors anymore.

This is starting to become a video game.

The concept is about the submarine, the yellow submarine, which i remodeled to fit the overall look now, d(r)iving around collecting yellow little fish, while avoiding, and also shooting, dark blue fish.

With lasers.

“pls don’t shoot me”

Each picked up yellow fish as well as every shot dark fish gives one point. There will be an infinite respawn of fish, but i have not implemented that yet. The game then will end when you inevitably get killed by one of the dark fish.

Then you see your highscore.

Each fish has its own little AI preventing him from swimming out of the water-plane and falling to its death.

They instead sometimes willingly swim into the open arms of the yellow submarine, getting swallowed whole.

I also set up a bunch of sounds, something i completely lacked when i last participated. sfxr did a great job.

Definitely having a blast here, hope everyone else is as well.

The day is nearly to the end for me so it’s time for some fun before sleep.

I started off pretty late today since I wasn’t sure what concept I would want to execute.
Eventually I picked one and worked on that for about 8 hours.

The concept is way too ambitious but if you don’t dream big, you won’t get big… or something along those lines.

I hope to be able to work tomorrow since I really want to finish this.
Thing is… The house will be packed with family to celebrate my old man’s b’day :c

Graveyard Tycoon – Camera controls, use 2 (of the 3-4 planned) tools, have money problems!

Here is an early screenshot

I have a swan on the screen, and it moves! Ok, yeah, not that much progress. I sense a busy day tomorrow. Screenshot shows html5 output from MonkeyX. I use my own Congo framework, but MonkeyX has a few good frameworks to choose from.

baz

Working on my second LD entry with Phaser and Adobe Illustrator. Not sure if I should add color or leave it black and white.

Today was the first first Ludum Dare day ever for me (no, that is not a typo). I quickly found out that my preparation was lacking, but also the theme was not entirely what I hoped for. A huge delay for me already before I started actually working. I now have a concept to go through with. One of the biggest things I had never done before was making my own graphics. I spent all evening working on them and they aren’t particularly fancy, but I made my own graphics, so that’s cool. I am not as far as I hoped for, because tomorrow I still have to upgrade to a new level loading system (I think I am going to stick with Tiled after all), include some new mechanics and – most importantly – actually design levels. I also still haven’t started on the character art yet. All in all it is going to be very close tomorrow, so we will see how far we will get before night falls tomorrow.

I would like to show you a screenshot, but none of the new art is in-game yet. But don’t be sad, tomorrow there will be plenty of pretty stuff to look at.

Soooooooooooo. I wanted to start in time for this LD, but there was a pretty good gaming expo in my city, so I went there, and lost one day. I decided that I will participate in the Compo then, and was thinking about a good idea meanwhile I was at the expo and got a really good one.

My tools:

Programming: Haxe w/ Flixel
Art: Paint/GIMP
Sound: bfxr/sfxr

Well after an absolute hell of a time debugging small problems with collision detection I decided to move on and carry on implementing the rest of the game. So far it looks good!

So what is the game’s story? Well I’ve made a platformer/shooter. Original I know, but I’ve actually never made one before, so it had to be done! The concept is you are a scavenger in a post apocolyptic world. The overworld is uninhabitable due to the resulting fallout after a worldwide zombie plague hit the country. To survive, you need to venture beneath the surface, to other bunkers to find food and supplies before you die of starvation! But beware, not all zombies were killed in the nuclear bombing…

Just finished off some basic zombie ai. Need to now get a death system working where they have a small chance to drop food for the player to collect. After that need to do transitioning to other rooms. Then the rest can be done tomorrow.

My project is going really well so far. It will resemble typical puzzle games like Tetris Attack where blocks must be adjusted in rows to remove them from the grid. In my game, you must advance through each puzzle stage to slowly travel deeper into a mysterious world beneath the Earth. I decided to not make the actual graphics yet, so here’s a heaping mess of squares and cursors:

More work has been completed!

• Movement
• Doors (mostly)
• Some art.

Something’s wrong.

Hey !

I just eat a big pizza drunk some RedBull, put my best ninja cloths and plugged in my speakers. The night can begin !

Oh, and the game is fine, I almost finished the core of coding. Now I have to enhance the user experience and draw some sprites.

The idea is to do a minesweeper. You control a man that want to defuse all mines presents on the map. You have to search them with your metal detector and defuse them but be carefull, you have a limited number of defuse kit.

Have a good night or whatever you want depending on your timezone.

Tags: 2D, foodphoto

I’ve been messed a bit around with the theme because I dont really get a neat idea, but then thought to concentrate on the graphics first, cause man iam a graphic designer :p

The work  has began, first 10 minutes and already doing sweet!

As the last few hours of the first day of Ludum Dare 29 tick down, a personal progress report of my first Ludum Dare seems appropriate. ‘Beneath the Surface’ has proven to be a fruitful theme, but choosing a concept that is achievable in 48 hours by someone not too familiar with rapid game prototyping, took a lot longer. Some of my overambitious ideas are promising enough to consider for a long-term hobby project though, so no wasted effort there.

The concept I ended up creating today is a variant of Snake. While that is about as unimaginative an idea as possible, given the theme, I think I managed to squeeze in enough twists on the familiar mechanics to make it interesting. Firstly, the player controlled serpent digs permanent paths trough the soil, and with the snake being affected by gravity, that makes maneuvering the playing field harder and harder. Additionally, the food the player eats to grow (apples) can only be found in trees, which cannot be climbed, or occasionally on the ground below the trees. This means the player has to get long enough to reach the higher apples or he can’t progress.

I decided to test drive the open-source Godot Engine for this Ludum Dare. For rapid development, the many built-in object types and the automatic resource handling is a dream. And while for a project like this, the scripting language is fine, fast even, I fear larger projects may reach the limitations of this language. On the other hand, the engine is open-source, and it is supposedly easy enough to hook native code into your project.

I enjoyed my first day immensely, and I’m oddly proud of my little Snake clone. For day 2, implementing underground lava and water pockets are on the agenda, as well as making those liquids flow and interact to create steam to propel the serpent high enough to reach the most delicious apples high up in the trees.

Wish me luck

I’m super late due to having to deal with my car having holes in the roof and it raining the entire day, but I began on the game and it’s impossible to beat so I added a way to cheat!


PLAY!

You can edit memory and maybe even win! Let me know if it’s any fun or hard! There are at least several ways to beat the game.

Time to sleep!

So this is my second LD @ Jam… aaand Forgot to inset the first “We’re participating post”, but after a day of slow rise and a few shots and beers n dumplings the visuals are slowly starting to look a lil bit like something.

The prototype is also coming along alright, hopefully it will turn out nice.

At first we wanted to make game with time manipulation but along the way decided to shift more towards more action’y One screen real time  crawler.

We are 2 people team and we are using HTML5/JS + Cocos2d for gameplay and some PS magic for visuals n pixels.

Take all screenshots by the way

while true; do
sleep 30s
scrot -e 'mv $f ~/rec_ludum'
done

And when you’ll finish, just run
convert -delay 40 -loop 1 ~/rec_ludum/*.png lol.gif
(change 40 and lol to approriate values for you)

The first day of my second LD48 is done!  I am really happy with how the game turned out!

9 levels are donel. Try it here: http://kevlanche.com/ld29/. Google Chrome (and Safari?) only I’m afraid.

If you get stuck you can skip levels with the +/- keys.

Any feedback is much appreciated!

And I’m getting more tired -_-

Gonna finish the basics and leave balance and bonuses for tomorrow..

The game is coming along nicely! I’m working on color chaining and re-enabling gravity on the blocks now.

Just a reminder, you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates.  Though as a side note, my Twitter account is not exclusively gamedev so YMMMV.

I spent the last few hours with fixing some bugs and optimizing code. I also made a model for the fireplace and a Woodtexture. Will continue tomorrow, Good Night.

Texture:

Model:

Tomorrow I will begin with finishing the remaining 10% of gameplay and then the focus is on content creation and level Design.

Most of the gameplay is done. Gotta zap them squids.

First LD and didn’t realize I should be posting over here. Ooops.

That’s ok, because I’ve been over on my blog. Crafty – a tile puzzle game.

http://wishfulrpg.blogspot.com/2014/04/ld48-game-design.html

Not surprisingly, I am WAY behind the other competitors, but I blame it on being a full time dad at the same time. But the extra time has let me do a fair bit of brainstorming and extra design work. Game is scoped and need to bang the core systems out tonight, after doing art. Kids will be participating in that, but I don’t think letting a 3 year old mush paint around disqualifies my artistic integrity.

So, my plan is to make a game about a killer whale hunting seals under breaking ice floes.

So far I implemented player movement: swimming in water, jumping in the air, bumping into ice blocks or skidding on them. I still have no idea if I’ll end up with something playable in time.

Looks like this form resizes images horizontally but not vertically. Click for unstretched version.

First screenshot!

Believe it or not, it’s probably the prettiest game I’ve made.

So far, basic mechanics, some graphics (player, first enemy, important buttons, walls), a few sounds, and a bit of the story are done. I’m having a bunch of fun, and I’m pretty happy with the game so far. I hope it at least turns out better than the awful chilli con carne, I just made for myself…

To-do: music (I’m working on that right now, using abundant-music.com), more enemy graphics, more story, more sounds, and levels. But, uhmmm, I’ve got all Sunday, eh?

Hope you guys are enjoying yourselves, good winds to you.

Tags: 1st screenshot

I’ve only done the solo compo for Ludum Dare. This time I had some friends with varying talents and some of them agreed to try it so I have a team!

I have to say doing a jam entry with a team is a completely different experience and a ton of fun.

It’s awesome to have other people to tackle pieces at the same time, and people with a talent for making art assets.

So heres to another great Ludum Dare, we are making great progress.

First Screenshot of our Work in Progress.

We are aiming to do a game with the limitations of Playstation one, but my lovely texture artist wanted to use Commodore palette for colors. So we are now making a PS1 style game that would have looked outdated even on PS1. 😀

I’ll finish soon for today. I’m pretty tired now, it’s nearly 11 pm here and I achieved a lot.

The main game play is working. You can guide the mole, eat the worms, get squashed by the gardener and suffocate. Random level generation is also working fine.

I’ll try to add flooding water as the final hazard for today and then I’ll take a break.

Late night food (just a banana and some water) and a desktop screenshot for your amusement 😉

Tomorrow will be spent for graphics, some sound effects and a title screen and the remaining finishing touches.

Later!

Logic Pro time.

Man, I really need some sleep now ^^ .. A little screenshot

See you tomorow guys.. Wish you luck.

I’m not sure if I’m gonna be satisfied with my work so far … or if I’ll be able to finish this in time (for compo) …

So far there is only a mole you can control, and worms that will disappear if you hit them …

Also not sure what I should be doing next …

My game isn’t to bad, but I wanted to add stuff like proper physics (with Box2D), but I ended up using my own really crappy collision thingy.

Progress has been slow. Had to cut some corners but I definitely think my idea is still doable.

Added in NPC’s.

-Ludusamo

Yes, I like the theme name so much I’m making it the name of the game.  I spent last night and most of this morning thinking out how to represent the theme on multiple levels and on how to integrate it into a world that I’ve been working on for a little while now.

Some minor background, there are three types of dragons: Equines, Humanoids, and Serpentine.  This story involves Snow Furry, an equine dragon and rune mage.  She’s contracted to clear out a ‘mistake’ by a sheriff at a rather extortionist price.

The game play has been bugging me quite a bit.  In the end, I’m settling for a top-down 2D view using Unity3D.  I’ll use a rather simple RPG rule-set at first, then see if I can expand it if there’s time.  Still very up in the air about how to handle the levels, thought at first it will simply be a sequence of square rooms with the primary objectives.  I’m also going to keep everything to single mouse clicks, with the intent of making this playable on a tablet.  I doubt a phone would enough screen space.

Also did a little bit of tech research for publishing the game.  Since my last LD, Koding changed their setup and can’t be used as free hosting any more 😛  So I nosed around a little and found out that Google Drive can be used as a very basic web host.  Have it all setup now – click here if you wish to test it – though at the moment there’s nothing there except a very bland title screen 😛

Gamemaker did it again! 😀

corrupted my project when loading a background file and for some reason all the backups are just empty. no content. Good news is I learned from this last time and have been renaming and saving to prevent this from being catastrophic. Gonna see what I can do to save the last couple of hours but luckily, it was mostly asset creation so I should be ok

Anyone else had this before?

This is what we got so far. In absolute darkness you will have to find way through the underground.

LD29 – update 01

I got the theme last night, and I brainstormed a few ideas, and decided to make a game about a mirmaid that is trying to protect the ocean from a curse that is only lifted by sacrificing humans to Poseidon.

The plan is to make an underwater metroidvania, where you go around and collect crystals that give you new magic powers. Powers necessary to sink human ships and access new areas, all while fighting the monsters that now plague the ocean because of the curse.

I’m starting a bit late because after brainstorming a bunch of things and deciding im going for the Jam(and having no caffeine, juice, or food) I decided to sleep and see if rest would help me think clearer this morning. After scrounging up breakfast I started making placeholder art and drew the above picture. No programming yet, but I have the rest of today to work on that.

Any concept critiques would be appreciated.

EDIT:

I am using Java, LWJGL, Slick2D, JBox2D, Gimp.

… I just submitted my entry.

It’s a short piece of narrative that won’t take you more than 3 minutes, requiers only 1 playthrough, can be played directly in your browser, don’t have a needlessly complex gameplay, and (cherry on top) you only need one hand to play it! Exactly what you need while eating that snack or drinking that coffe.

> PLAY <

Good luck to all of those who were lucky enough to be able to spend the whole 48h (or even 72h) on their games.

I refined the core mechanics, and I’m starting to feel satisfied, of course there is still a long way to go but hey, it’s something!

It’s a digging game in HTML5 using phaser.

Here’s what it looks like right now:

Source on github

I am not sure if it was worth the 6 hours of work, but I like it.

I’ve realised (late) that Allegro.pas included a sprite+tile engine. I suppose that it counts as middleware, doesn’t it? Anyway, I did some changes to it.

So, I have the engine and a sprite that doesn’t move. Fortunatelly, I have the game design finished.

After dinner I’ll try to make the submarine control. Then tomorrow I’ll try to finish. If I can’t then may be I can swap to the Jam compo…

Lets see its been about 4-5 hours since I started.

It is a kinda of Beneath the Surface speed runner and stuff.

Ill add better graphics with color when i have basic stuff locked down.

If you want to play the early build it is available here:

https://sites.google.com/site/nuvleargames/home-1/downloads?pli=1

Ludum Dare has been great so far! I have created Pelican Challenge, where you have to dive beneath the surface of the water to get to the desired fish.

Links

• Play the game here.
• The code is available on GitHub here.

Phew… day one complete.

During the first day, there was a lot of things that I’ve never tried before – for example doing pixel ‘art’. Most of the day went watching and reading tutorials how I can do this and that.

So far, I think I have deleted 2/3 of all content I’ve created. Some things just didn’t work out so I recreated them or just scratched entirely. During the day, my game just became simpler and simpler – mostly because of my limited skills. Currently the game is just about jumping ladders up and reaching the top. There is water in the game which player should avoid. Water surface level is getting higher all the time. So basically this game is about
jumping ladders and avoid getting into water / beneath the surface. I know the is veeeery loosely based on theme.. but this what I started working on and I don’t have time to start again from scratch.

Most of the graphics are just some colored boxes and there’s no background… and water is green :). So the graphics are the main focus tomorrow. Most of the game logic is already done.

Here’s the screenshot:

Good night.

I guess I’ve got some things setup, like AI, but I haven’t made too many assets myself. :/

Maybe I should scrap the project and not use anything from the asset store. That way I can actually make a lot of stuff on my own instead of just some models, art and environments.

I slacked off far too much yesterday, went to bed early, woke up late, AND had to reprogram my computer. This really isn’t looking too good.

So I’m done coding for today and I’m reasonably happy where I am. Tomorrow I need to fine tune some controls and AI, create more levels for the game, finish the HUD, finish all the game screens and if there is time after that I aim to make things look better.

Tags: java, libgdx

Njnmnm.. Conclusions so far: HaxeFlixel has been very good and supportive to work with. I’m so glad I did not decide to write my own engine in raw HaXe and OpenFL this time – yeesh what stress that would’ve brought.

Also tried to run the game on my Nexus 7 and it worked flawlessly on the first compile! Who-ho!

Made a MainMenu and then 5 levels with Tiled. This LD experience gives lots of hands down learning with lots of software – just as I hoped. Spent 2+ hours on some silly particle effects, they look very corny but adds some p-zazzz to the game. Currently FlashDevelop is a bit buggy due to my morning re-install of everything.

This is the Main Menu

All in all this has been a very productive day. It feels so good messing with “vaporware” instead of “seriousware-that-will-redefine-gaming-as-sloths-know-it” and all that horrible back-stabbing perfectionism. Looking at what others bring, the (visual) range is from “jaw-dropping-incredible” to “screen.addRectangle(0,0,32,32,0xFFFFFF);” (programmer art at it’s best!).

Will probably add some sounds / music tomorrow. FL Studio, we will meet again.

At the halfway point now, end of day one!

Your planet’s being devoured by some kind of Eldritch horror.  Can you dig through the whole planet to escape? Can you defeat it with ancient buried secrets? (Probably not!)

Few more obstacles & Overheating/Death to code tomorrow mornin’, bit of music & sound effects, then the home stretch!

‘Till tomorrow!

I work faster than expected. There’s already a version you can play (Windows & Web) accessible here !

I’m working on Goblins now, who’re going to try to stab and rob your miners.

I’m going to start polishing my game, already. I really liked the idea I had for it, but I don’t know how I can show everything I want to the player… It’s been a while since I last written any story, and that’s really making things a lot harder. I’ll see what I’ll do about the game, afterwards. Adding scenes isn’t too troublesome, I just need to have drawn everything before.

Well, here’s the current version. There’s only the first scene, and I need to redo all the graphics.

I actually forgot about this because I’ve never used it really. Any way, here’s a screen shot:

So that’s what I’ve got going so far. Here’s the sub herself:

Rather tiny. But that’s the idea. Tiny player in a large environment to allow for exploration. I thought about it a little bit, and there are NO enemies. That doesn’t mean there won’t be giant creatures, however. Anyways, til next update!

-Laters

It’s not a game if there’s no shooting in it!

I’m calling it a night, been working for about 15 hours, and progress has been very good… I’m 30 minutes ahead of schedule, which is very good!

The ship now mines the deposits, can repair/reload if you land softly, can shoot at enemies, which can damage the player if they get touched by it (other enemies will shoot back, but that’s for tomorrow).

Gameplay-wise, I’m only missing the other enemies, UI and the upgrade/RPG part, and glue everything together, so hopefully I’ll have a lot of polish/balancing (better graphics, music, sound FX, etc) to make this fun!

Cya all tomorrow!

Her dog is dead. Gotta help her escape into her imaginary world. Beneath the surface? Nah, STAY at the surface of things. Never go too deep.

I miss you, Toby.

(Click image to view GIF)

Well as day 1 comes to a close a Special Code now adds funny little Nyan cat! Testing out the cheat system!

I am now 20 hours in. Progress is slow, and I can feel my effectiveness waning.