There’s something here. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll turn into a game!

The second Level is done! This may very well be the third level you play in the final version but for now it is the second one and it is done : )

It has gone pretty slow. I have spent too much time trying to convert corner walls to be diagonal so that the player can use as a reflective surface. But I got that in.

Also added some lighting for the player’s submarine.

Diagonal wall and lighting

Seems like I have a long way to go, but not giving up yet. Will continue tomorrow morning.

This is what I got for the 24 Hour mark. Haven’t got a title screen yet but it’s called, Spunk Spelunk c:

The dialog system is coming along pretty nicely. I’m trying to get over my fears about writing. It is the thing I’m always most nervous about and the slowest at. Ludum Dare can be good therapy in trying things you’re scared of though so I’m just going to plow on ahead.

Each one of those dialog options slightly affects your personal stats. This is early in the game, but every little action shapes your history and relation with the town.

Bored or taking a break? Stop by my livestream and say “hello”. I could always use a friendly distraction–even during the compo! 😀 It’s been nice having folks drop in and out.

Well, back to work!

Tags: Dialog, flash, mines, mining

Happy 2nd day of Ludum Dare!

Wanted to post a pro tip here!

Wind your mind down with smaller tasks before you go for a sleep break. You will rest better without brain spin.find some small graphic tidying or folder arranging that will take about twenty minutes and allow your brain to calm down before you turn in for the night/morning.

Right now I have done the major components of the game. I can either take tomorrow easy and polish what I have got… or stretch for new tasks and see what else I can achieve…

Think I got some planning to do tomorrow morning. I can’t help it. I am a designer! 😉

Night all

But before that…. Check your bathroom!

I’m done for this day. I started about 12 hours ago and have been doing this non-stop, with 1 break and a few chatting moments with friends. Today was a good day.

So, I’m making a puzzle/stealth/shooter kinda game. Pixel art as always, and no animations/sound since I’m going to do those tomorrow.

Screenshot:

I have to say, this has been an exciting 24 hours. I settled fairly quickly last night on a game concept which I was extremely happy with, only to find that I was having immense trouble actually getting the very menu-navigation intensive gameplay to look/feel intuitive. I ended up cutting a lot of content for the purposes of streamlining the final product that people have to play. Anyhow, I’ve got something which I feel comfortable calling done on a mechanical level, now it’s just a matter of figuring out ways of making the whole thing look and feel a little better. Screen shake and particle effects, here I come.

Here’s a screenshot of progress, by the way:

It’s a game about keeping trapped miners from losing all hope of ever getting rescued. I’m pretty sure that the mechanics are a lot more luck-based than skill/strategy based, but the moment to moment gameplay has proved interesting and engaging for both me and my cousin, which I think is a good sign.

Hey,

Im working on my second attempt at LD, a small first person dungeon crawler. Im not bad at programming but my environment art is godawful, at least UE4’s purrty graphics kinda make up for it. I feel like I wont be able to meet my goals on time but whatever, I guess whatever I get done at this point is a pretty good job.

List of  Game Mechanics:

– Melee AI (DONE)

– Ranged AI (DONE)

– Player projectiles (DONE)

– Health and player/enemy levels (DONE)

– Environment and Dungeons (INDEV)

– EXP Orb Drops (TODO)

– Enemy kill counter to win (TODO)

– Boss after all enemies are killed (TODO)

Here is a small preview of the first two areas of the environment (Please click it for a better view):

Small preview of environment

Hey all!  My name is John.  This is the first Ludum Dare I’ve ever entered, and I’m obviously totally psyched!

The game I just submitted is called “Abstraction.”  It’s the only game you’ll ever play that integrates its own code into the experience (at least I think so. . . 😉 ).  Being that it’s my first Dare, I’d love to have some feedback on how the project went and what I could look to do better with in the future.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37025

Thanks a lot, and I look forward to looking at all the awesome games that are on here.

Solus Deus

Created the player submarine avatar. Looks kind of “space ship”-esque, but I think it still passes as a sea-faring vessel.

Essentially, I’m going for a player controlled ship that you will use to explore the ocean depths. My grand vision for the game will be a Metroid-type game with exploration and upgrading your vessel as the main goals of the game. For LD I’ll probably just have a basic map with enemies and hopefully a loot/upgrade system in place.

So it’s been 24 hours since Ludum Dare started and I furiously started hammering away at my keyboard, hoping my facerolling would somehow end up with a playable thing on the screen. A lot can happen in that time, so I’d like to share what my first half of the journey has been like so far. Both good and bad.

The good:

• My choice of tech. Lua is a wonderful language for getting things done quickly, and with the work I put in before Ludum Dare started, I was able to get simple things up and running in an extremely short time. (or at least what felt like an extremely short time) Adding new features and putting the various bits and bobs my game needs together has been an absolute pleasure and very easy. It has only taken me a couple tries for each thing to get something most of the way, if not all of the way to where it needs to be. SDL2 is also a fantastic library to build on top of, and puts in basically all the features I need. I don’t even need to create bitmap fonts, because I can just generate all the glyphs I need at runtime, in any size, color, etc.
• Choosing to do a top-down perspective for my game has been great. While the perspective is wonky for putting together the graphics, the basic movement mechanics were basically done within a few minutes.
• Low-resolution graphics + blocks for all the things = simple collision and almost no performance penalty for drawing. Make the code ALL the sloppy, and still get away with it.
• Working with code I wrote the entirety of makes it so easy to do things. I don’t have to look up some method to do something for me, or scour the internet for some odd/subtle bug/feature, I know everything that is available at all times. I can even go modify it quickly and easily, because I know every line. This doesn’t outweigh the benefit of really knowing an existing engine, but it is a nice benefit as I don’t really know that much about most engines out there, and that could cause me to take a very long time to implement something that only took me a few minutes with my own code.
• Using mixins with a bunch of reusable components/entities. I need to throw up some debug walls quickly, and don’t have any graphics? Mix in the ColoredRect component, and I’m good to go. I need a bunch of animations for my main character? Animated takes care of that. Very nice indeed.

The bad:

• Using my own handrolled “engine”/code definitely adds a lot of complexity to getting from the start of wanting to do something, to having finished that thing. I have to craft all of it by hand, right then. Not only does this take time, but it adds bugs. I didn’t have a library which can lay out lines of text for me, so I had to make my own for speech bubbles, and they don’t handle word separation correctly. It will just jump to the next line in the middle of a word, or not correctly align words in the middle of the bubble, etc. As a bonus, some of those bugs actually help with the general theme of what I’m going for, so it isn’t ALL bad.
• Not having a premade camera system/collision system sucks. Especially with a limitation of SDL2 where it won’t draw images outside of the window’s area, causing me to have to track two global variables and add them to every entity before drawing them. Also the massive performance drain of brute forcing collision detection, ugh.
• Without optimized game loops, collision, etc., it’s easy to run into massive performance issues. I’ve had my collision take greater then 30ms (when I shoot for 16ms) per frame, causing huge slowdowns. On top of that, with my current schema of disabling garbage collection in Lua so that I can manually ask it to collect garbage every few frames, but only when time is available, I can hit problems where enough time is taken that the system decides it doesn’t have enough time to collect garbage, and pile up garbage infinitely. It hasn’t been too uncommon to see my game start taking 700+MB of memory suddenly, because it didn’t have enough time to let Lua reclaim memory.

At this point, I believe the game is largely “feature complete”, in the sense that I don’t really need to put together many more features in order to finish making it. I largely need to make a bunch of assets, define all the levels, and put together some rudimentary story. Hopefully it all turns out relatively interesting, and I can complete everything I want before the time runs out tomorrow. Honestly the full game is still going to be pretty darn simple. If I get lucky, it might even have some fighting mechanics at the end, if you can even find the actual end

On the topic of this year’s theme “Beneath the Surface”, I went a little bit less literal. My game has nothing to do with subterranean exploring or the deep ocean, but instead is going to have a main part of the game you play, with something hidden “beneath the surface” that you have to find. You might get subtle hints while playing the game as to what’s really going on, but you might have to pay attention to see them.

My “Nesty Fall”, 24 hours later.

Pinger is pretty much playable right now. The “art” is awful, but the core gameplay mechanics are in place. Also, I’ve got sound this time.

The game is a mining game, where you need to pick up gold, and avoid water. The player (green ball in these screenshots) can deploy a sonar pulse to find items in the map. It does not reveal their location, only their distance. The player must make multiple pulses from different locations to locate gold or water.

Pinger is played in a browser, and works in Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. IE and Safari are untested. It can be found here.

I’m not very good at game jams apparently. Last time I did C++, now we’re doing HTML5 (no prior HTML5 experience).

The good news is, we’ve got the “engine” up and running, now we’re actually working on gameplay! Soon I’ll be able to fire up Pickle and start animating… once I get the game loop working.

Making platformers is kind of hard when you are not dealing with tile maps and bounding boxes, but physics objects and bounding polygons. I might have bitten more than I can chew. Especially on the monster AI department. Needs two raycasts: for avoiding falls and to turn on obstacles. Also have to figure out the idiosyncrasies of Construct 2. I’m sure there’s a way to do everything, it usually is just easier to code those things. But Construct 2 keeps things orderly.

At least the game looks kind of pretty and the lighting worked out fine. Drawing tablet and Krita have been amazing so far.

So, after almost giving up on my game, I was able to save it and I’m almost done! If there’s something I learned in this Ludum Dare, is to plan, not like an EPIC plan, but to actually plan the basics/mechanics of the game before just start doing stuff on the heat of coding, that almost costed my ludum entry this time. And I had a lot of lost sleep. I’m awake since friday morning. But yeah I think things are starting to look better now:

My project is a very small, simple one.

No. That’s a lie.

I realized there is no multi-head, multiplayer focused, opensource  submarine simulator out there, so I decided to write one. This LD Jam will produce a prototype of it. That’s one kind of game my father would always play with me (Silent Service, for NES).

Multi-head? What do I mean with that?

Simple: If you ever tried playing a submarine simulator, you will quickly realize it puts THE ENTIRE SHIP under your command. And while this is cool for a ride, seems somewhat unsuitable for combat, where you quick and precise responses from every station. I remember getting annoyed by the “change current station” behaviour of 688 Attack Sub. I would try to lock on a sonar signal, but switching to weapons and locking a torpedo was so cumbersome that I would always lose the lock.

So, in my simulador, every station is a separate application you can (and should) run on a separate machine (or tablet, or phone). You could even invite some friends over and have them fill in for every station available! Cool, huh?!

…And what if, on top of that, you could compete with other human-controlled submarine? Take some other 5 friends of you can go for a 3 x 3 competition! But that multiplayer server will have to wait for a while.

About graphics: for this prototype, there will be none. The simulator itself will be kind of a Telnet server on steroids, opening a telnet connection for each available station and offering a text interface to command that part of the ship. Eventually, I will have graphical clients. I have SVG handling libraries I’m itching to use for a eventual Cartography station.

What I intend to deliver: a simple “multi-head” submarine simulator, but not focusing that much on realism.

I grew up playing A LOT of Microprose simulators, specially in the Stealth Fighter series. I would love to deliver a game with at least one mission mimicking that kind of simulation.

What do I already have: some basic modelling of the simulation with a Futuristic Scenario as an example (I intend to have historic scenarios as well) , a generic submarine and underwater base. The sub is still static, but slowing coming to “life”.

To be fair, I had a few setbacks and chose a very ambitious theme – But I believe this is a cool project worth the shot.

License: 3-Clause BSD.

Edit: I lied again – I haven’t checked much about submarine simulators, but there seems to be very few of it.

Edit 2: don’t know about you, but I had buckets of playing those simulators when I was a kid. And as much as I feel annoyed by some aspects of 688 Attack Sub, it’s still darn fine simulator .

Edit 3: for clarity

Death Screens!

The sad truth, of when the president dies you die.

Work has been going pretty well! (On my first Ludum Dare ever…) Haven’t had as much time to work on this project as I’d like, but things are coming together.

I still have a *lot* of stuff I’d like to implement, so now the concern is just time (and art ability). I also have many aspects of my core game mechanic that I’m in the process of creating.

My plan now is to finish as many of the core game mechanics as I can, do another art pass to clean up some animations / pixel art, and then add my “reach goal” mechanics.

Here’s to hoping I can pull off a fraction of that in the next couple hours… 😀

BTW, the title I”m going for is “You Must Break Things. ” just to give you an idea of what vision I have for the core gameplay.

I think I’ve made good progress in the first 24 hours. I’ve now got a working game shown in the preview below.

Since I’m only entering the jam I feel pretty good about having 2 more days to add better art, music, more content, and polish.

Click for full sized animated gif

So things are slowly getting there which is exciting.

I was afraid throughout the day that I may not be able to finish, but I am feeling more confident now.

We will see what happens tomorrow though. For now good night all.

– Ludusamo

Hello everyone!

We are a team of three game students who go by the name Dutchess Games, which is both a reference to our nationality and a pun, and we are very excited to take part in our first Ludum Dare.

We are making a game about the tree of life “Yggdrasil”, who is a God in our game, he attempts to restore the connection between man and nature. He hopes to accomplish this by taking over the earth and sucking the life out of people.

In these screenshot you see the gameplay of Yggdrasil using a vine to consume a human (the red things). Naturally this is a work in progress and the art hasn’t been implemented yet.

These are thumbnails, concept art of our poor unfortunate souls, which will be consumed by Yggdrasil.

Yggdrasil is really neat, but he is too much to take in for now, therefor he shall be exposed another day.

We are very excited to see the creative ideas other people came up with. Good night and good luck with your projects!

– Mathijs, Masha and Jaden.

It is called Scary Ugly Face.  Title may or may not be relevant.

May the going of nuts commence.

Who knew hard coding an interface like this would be so fun?

It’s my first game in Perl, and I’m going really slow… But I’m making progress and I will do that fucking game ’cause:

I DONT GIVE UP.

Hopefully will make up some distance tomorrow. Hopefully. So far:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53322618/Ludum%20Dare%2029/RRiPP01001Rev/RRiPP01001Rev.html

Any guesses which 1995 game was the inspiration for this?

–Rev

Well, my tower defense game is coming along nicely.

Unfortunately I only have 2 hours tomorrow morning to finish everything. On my list of things to do:

1) implement 2 new towers

2) add 2 new enemies

3) implement spawners

4) balance the game out

Admittedly, it was a bit of a slow day. I’ve been kind of burnt out from real life (and real life still is going on!) and it may have carried over despite the fact that I was pretty excited for this Ludum Dare. On top of that, I decided to tackle one of the bigger AI coding things pretty early; this was so I could gauge whether or not I could finish the project in good time. I ended up sort of crawling along.

That being said, I’ve made SOME progress and after toying with the little tech demo I have, I’m very pleased. Its still pretty bare, but I do think I’m on to something great here. And that means I can hopefully focus on simpler stuff as I head down the stretch. If I can get and maintain some momentum, I think I have a chance of knocking this bad boy out. CAN I MAKE IT?!

You can play with the tech demo a little bit here (you can click to drop more turkeys too):

http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26060

The debug drawing takes away from the suspense a little, but technically speaking it might be cool to see what’s going on.

Got the first level kinda blocked out. Used my PCG to generate the walls/playable area then scattered around the decoration by hand. When I wake up will do more decoration and improve more on the level, right now it’s 4am and I need sleep xD

Time to call it a night. After struggling with the unnecessarily complex code I wrote initially, I’ve finally got something vaguely playable with some basic art. Will require lots of work on the gameplay to make it fun, some sfx and animations/gfx polish. Oh and a name would help.. .

Welp, that’s it for today.

Click here to play the game in its current state, and click here for today’s timelapse.

So here’s around 11 hours of work! I got a player that can walk around, basic enemies, tiles (You can interact with them), lighting, collision and multiple levels! This game will be an RPG styled dungeon crawler game (a little inspired by The Legend of Zelda) .

Tomorrow I plan on adding more enemies,  items, levels and making a final boss! Wish me luck,

~ GhostID out

I’ve got a puzzle! And, this may not sound like much to you, but… I think it’s actually a good puzzle! I’ve never made a good puzzle before, but this one’s good! Hooraaayyyy! Try it out immediately!

How puzzling!

Also, level 1 is designed for messing around and getting used to the controls. Try playing it for a bit!

For some reason I thought I only had 24 hours to make a game. Oh well!  Now I have time to make fun to play!  

                          This is what I have so far…

So I’ve gotten some basic enemies done. I’ve also implemented part of the combat.

They’re chasing me!

By “part of the combat”, I mean only the bow. Which means your knife is useless at the moment. Good luck surviving far enough to get it. 😛

The mechanics are working. Simple drill down, connect pipes to resources. Resources help build pipes

Now I have 23 hours to make an attractive game out of this.

Source on github

I decided to try Ludum Dare.  Normally I wouldn’t because my son has soccer tournaments and this weekend is National Cup.  He couldn’t play because of an MCL injury so instead of sitting around watching hockey, I’m creating a game, taking my daughter to Michaels and the library, going for walks with my son for physical therapy, cooking lunch and dinner AND finally coding and watching hockey (Go Kings!).

At first I was thinking is not sure a goos idea to participate. I only have about 23 hours left.  I’m starting very late.  I have two ideas with minimal sketches and no code written yet.  Then I thought, hell, it’s like being back a Disney making last minute games for the launch for Disney Daily Blast &  Disney XD where I only had hours from concept to live.

What I’ll be using

• TypeScript
• Phaser 2.0.2
• Visual Studio Web
• Photoshop
• Coffee to keep me awake

Starting right now I’ll be posting updates to my @sputnikgames on twitter.  I’ll also be posting a link to the game as it progresses.

Let’s see what happens…

Tags: journal, phaser, progress, typescript

Well 24 hours have passed and not super far a long, but worked out a bunch of bugs and issues.
Still have one issue lingering with collisions and the player being able to run through walls, but will figure that out soon enough.

I did get some basic animations in, and updated some of the sprites.
I also got the map scrolling working.

Tonight will be the time to knock out a bunch of mechanics.

Most of the actual gameplay pretty much done, tomorrow is reserved for polishing, testing and especially sound and music.

Looking forward to tomorrow, I hope I won’t be too hungover.

Coded myself a procedural submarine model from cylinders and spheres:

Now getting some sleep…

So the idea is to heat the sun by creating fusion by bouncing molecule spheres into each other…

and now they are bouncing!

The screenshot just shows circles, but no time for video right now…

bouncy spheres

hopefully playable prototype up tonight.

So, I’ve been writing a story in Twine, and it’s been surprisingly difficult to craft an experience that’s both engaging and has player choice in a written format. Like mostly everyone else, my game takes place underground. It’s a lot shorter than others, as I’m not what you would call a writer.

I honestly don’t see myself making Twine games in the future, but it’s been a surprising experience writing a story. However, it’s given me a lot more appreciation for the people who have to make all the scenarios in games like Beyond: Two Souls and the Mass Effect series, knowing that a large percentage of players won’t even know some content exists.

Well, I’m clocking out. Hope to finish and polish my story by the end of the jam.

If you want to check out what I have so far, you can play my game here. Bear in mind that some of the scenarios are not completed yet as you play.

So contrary to what I thought when I was entering this compo super late, I am actually quite relaxed and somewhat staying on shedule. Last time I did join LD is over a year ago I was totally stressed out at that point. Probably I´m not in crunch-overdrive because my expectations were low to begin with since I joined the compo 17h after they announced the topic =D

Anyways this is what I was working on during the last few hours! You´ll be playing a piranha who is living in a sandbox (don´t ask me how I came up with this) and is preying on children. Your goal is to eat as many of them as possible (as I said I have nooo idea where that idea came from…) while staying beneath the surface as much as you can. The core mechanics are implemented which leaves me one whole day for all the art, sound and maybe even some polishing =D

till then, Good night

@Tschery

Well this is my first ludum dare, and its going well, but relatively slowly. The first night (friday) I started work on a top-down alien planet exploration and cataloging game…It went nowhere fast. This morning, I decided to scrap everything and start fresh. I had no ideas (still don’t) so I went as bland as possible and started work on an underground platformer. Its going pretty well, although I have a hard time keeping motivated. I’ve also realized that I’m not very big on level design…. Heres some gifs, and for more progress you can follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/nico_m__):

http://t.co/w80k16g3Uk

http://t.co/aLoYJsQVad

http://t.co/XkLH3EZmh1

Tags: haXe, HaXeFlixel, openfl

Here are four of the nine characters from our game! You play as the least interesting of all of them; the bald guy. His name is Erik, but don’t let that fool you; it doesn’t make him any more interesting.

It took about 3 and a half hours to create “level 1” with the little text parser, so it was worth making considering how long it would have taken without it.

Don’t got any polish, and I haven’t even finished the behavior of the entities, so push time.

I guess it’s about time I give my one day update. I think I might be the only person to be doing a first person horror game (as far as I know from browsing posts from time to time, please don’t virtually scrutinize me if you are). I’m more of an artist than programmer, so I figured I’d let my creativeness flow into a horror game. I’m not too focused on graphical realism as I am making the horror feel real. In other words, Its not gonna be a “jump scare” fest

I use psychological elements to make the player go “Did I just see a shadow?” or “I swear someone’s following me”  . Not just “where did that horribly designed monsters just come from to pop out at my face…..”.

I’ve got the plot line for the game layed out, and although it’s pretty short, I’ve got some nice horror elements displayed in a short amount of time. I’ve got most of the level designed, as well as the main enemy designed. The game takes place in an abandoned mine shaft/ bunker, so the enemy is a deranged miner who uses a drill and a pick axe. I’ve got the player in the game to the point where he can walk around, open and close doors, and end the game. I haven’t done anything with the enemy yet, so currently Im coding the enemy and doing his animations simultaneously.

I might not have much time for it. but I’m trying to deploy an Outlast style dynamic enemy system, where the enemy does not operate on a fixed path. After I finish the enemy programming, I have to work on the lighting and the sound design, which I want to be the main focus of the game. Good Luck to everyone in the last 24 hours of the comp and the last 48 of the jam!!!

Here’s a screenshot of the game so far: 

What lies beneath the surface?  The wireframe will tell you…

I am actually getting better at this modeling stuff!  Now if I can use the remaining day to turn this proof-of-concept into a complete game…

So, I started the compo with an idea about fighting over mining rigs deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant, with an awesome modular ship editor and stealth combat and multiplayer, and…

And then this happened. This is what happens when you try and use an obscure 3D graphics library, using an entirely untested wrapper, in a game jam. Although I’d been estatic about using Python, and the library, and ODE for physics, I had to reconsider everything. I didn’t want to try and make a twitch-based multiplayer game in JS (my backup idea), so that idea was out straight away.

So I floundered a bit, and then thought “Everyone is doing submarine games, what if you’re hunting something ‘Beneath the Surface’?” And thus the idea of hunting swimming kaiju from giant flying battleships was born. It should be an asymmetric multiplayer game where one player plays the kaiju (which has hidden movement, and a single powerful attack) and all the rest of the players play three of the big battleships and a number of smaller scout flyers. Action happens frozen synapse style, with each player performing their turns, and then they’re all played out at once and then everyone makes their new turns.

I have a sketch of the server, some of the engine code and the models for the ship and the flyers done. This is the first time I have successfully textured an object without basically assembling a papercraft in Google Sketchup. Tomorrow, more actual game, more server, deploy the server etc. Onwards to victory!

I’m still alive, and worked on the aesthetic of the game…

Now I should add some gameplay ah !

At least, I know what the game is about. After some sleep, I’ll code the actions and prepare the stage for the player.

It should be fine !

This theme is hard, being ill is hard (I have a cold and a sore throat.) But making a game with a hard theme with a mild illness in just 48 hours?? Challenge accepted.

So, yesterday I couldn’t figure out a unique concept with a “fun” mechanic. If you notice there are two major game types so far – underground and underwater. So after about 2-3 hours of boring ideas, I just went with fishing/diving game where you would have to dive to catch fish to survive. Some of the game ides that I thrown out were Dermatologist simulator and Snake oil salesman simulator. But I wanted the game to be as much as relevant to the theme as possible and I want to be a cool Gamedev dad so my kids would love to play my game.

Here is the screenshot, most of the core elements are still unfinished such as the fishing part.

it’s like 15% done and I only have 22 hours left.

This art style was inspired from Ultima V from the Commodore 64. Yeah that game has like 4 floppy disks. And I still remember the numerous times I had to switch floppy disks and wait 10 minutes just to enter a town

Here I stand, after nearly 15 hours of work, with what I hope can be called a game by the end of tomorrow. A lot of things could’ve gone much better, and a lot of them could’ve gone worse! I spent WAY too much time bug fixing and tweeking movespeeds and the likes. I spent around 3 hours looking online for solution to problems which turned out to be spelling mistakes, but I’m happy ^^ I was productive today!

What I’ve done so far:

• Basic movement
• Gliding
• Wall grabbing/ Jumping
• The Title!
• Fake lighting, although it’s what I want
• Death
• The mainlevel design
• Performance optimization

I had planned to do some sort of modular dungeons with enemies or puzzles in them, but I just settled with the exploration objective. Getting to the bottom without getting hurt so you can escape. I’ve spent way too much time researching how to do things rather than doing them. Guess it’s something that goes away with experience so I’m hoping next time it’ll flow much more easily.

What’s ahead of me:

• Music
• Sound effects
• Proper Tiling
• Better player sprites
• Level design tweeking
• Winning condition
• Splash screen
• Logo
• General graphical improvement
• Anything I’m not recalling right now, it’s 4am.

Anyway, thanks for reading. See you all tomorrow!

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to give up on this one. The game I’ve got is pretty unplayable, and though I might have been able to polish it up in time for release, I’ve encountered some pretty irritating bugs and design flaws that are going to make it impossible for me to get it in a state that I’m happy with.

It was fun while it lasted, though, and I wish those still working the best of luck! I look forward to seeing what people release when all is said and done.

It’s interesting, looking at the Dare log entries coming through.  Whenever I’ve heard or seen any Ludum Dare entries, I’ve always thought it was a “test your skills at making a 3 minute game with a theme” sort of thing.  However, the blog entries tell tales of sweeping programming skill, vast underworlds to explore, and many other things that I would never have the patience to do myself.  I respect very much every single person doing stuff like that!

However, it does make me speculate; shouldn’t a 48 hour jam be about making a 48 hour game, not, say, 3 week game done in 48 hours?  It’s a genre of titles that is nearly untapped; making just a small little thing, a bite-sized little game that doesn’t just complete itself in a sitting but in a coffee break.  Nobody really makes high quality titles with this mentality.

Not until the Ludum Dare rolls around every year that is, or so I thought.

So what’s the real thing?  Is the Ludum Dare and like competitions made for quickly developed titles, or very small but well thought out titles?  Or is it for both?

I’m personally on the side of the compact titles, and if you’re interested in seeing what I mean by that you can certainly check out my own entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37025

It’s some interesting thoughts to keep in mind.

Solus Deus

Hey all This is my current progress, after a very slow start.
The main character (currently a capsule) suffers from amnesia and knows not where he is.
What will he discover on his journey to the surface? He’s got a gigantic lab-grown plant to aid his escape!

The setting is supposed to be of an abandoned subterranean laboratory, but I need to add some detail to properly suggest that.

Will update on further improvement.
In the meantime, have fun coding!

I’ve got a playable build of my game so far, available here:

http://ricefrog.com/LD29/SplashEuropa.html

In your amphibious ship you have to dodge bobbing icebergs on the melted moon of Jupiter, Europa.

Your jets are weaker than both gravity (in the air) and buoyancy (in the water) so you can’t help but move in a wave pattern… you use your up/down jets to influence the wave.  Pretty pleased with the basic feel so far.

Death is fairly common, so I’ve kept the retry loop extremely short, but not quite so short as my LD28 game where the players complained it was so fast they got confused about whether they won or lost.  You’ll go through a lot of ships. Fortunately the Science Team brought a spare…

I had the basics working a while ago, but there were too many ways to basically cheat.  I’ve closed the gaps, and now I think you have to participate in the game I want you to play in order to win.

Next up, core mechanic 2!  Hopefully they pair well together…

Ideally I’ll finish that tonight, and get a head start on tomorrow’s tasks of sound and polish.

My Entry so far

This is my first Ludum Dare and my first time actually committing to making a full game (most my previous projects fall short). The first 24 hours have been amazing, hopefully the next 24 are just as good.

First day went nicely, I have most of the game in and even a way to create levels, which I’ll do today.

First, I’ll focus on music and sfx!

So, good morning, time to get some coffee and get to work!!

But first, a stop to the bathroom!

Tags: Beneath the Surface, Blueberry Soft, first person

Before Sleep Update

So it’s 6 AM and I really want to sleep. It’s 22 hours left till compo will end, and I haven’t done much. Here’s the update.
Anyways I’ll try to polish this, and maybe add something more!

Good luck allnighters!
– RedPanda

Tags: ld29, update

Things are happening! Hooray!

Tomorrow I’ll make a final push and hopefully everything will fall into place.

http://i.cubeupload.com/frOxp7.gif

As you can see, I’m going for a slightly sinister vibe with this! There’s more than meets the eye, etc!

Have been looking forward to competing for the first time. Using Game Maker Studio, have made a decent start for the compo. Not entirely happy with it yet, but it’s getting there . 

Tags: Beneath, Beneath the Surface, platformer

Oh right, am doing a screencap of today as well. Most of it will be me browsing the phaser.io documentation..

Also some more info about my setup:

Scaffolding comes via this phaser.io template which is a Phaser.IO template based on grunt/coffeesript.

My IDE of choice for JS/Coffeescript is Jetbrains Webstorm 8

.. a few hours later:

Well this was the plan.. Phaser.io tiles will not do my bidding so I am probably abandoning it.

Maybe there is enough time for a rewrite in some framework with better documentation?

Art Update: http://wishfulrpg.blogspot.com/2014/04/ld48-art-update.html
Coming along slowly but surely. Going to spend some time reformatting textures, resizing and clean up.

Almost finished putting in core mechanics, enemies and then level design next

Most of the basics are down so tomorrow should definitely bring a finished (eh) product. It might not be clear right now why it fits the theme but hopefully by tomorrow it will be.

Proud of myself though, my first Ludum Dare was daunting at first but I think I might just be able to pull something off :D.

After a long night, I finished the major features for my game, portals and reversible gravity. The core idea of the game is, that you can (and sometimes have to) proceed beneath the surface.

After what seems like a whirlwind of headaches I have something to show for it.  Being my first time I have have to say I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and now I know why the warm-up exists.  I started and changed about 3 ideas before I finally settled on this one and and it is coming together brilliantly

My first idea was to make a game about a Vet for monsters that would use magic to get super small and fight the diseases “Beneath the surface” I got the platforming down and did some cool stuff with the tiles, it wasn’t working for me.

So I started over….at about 10 am the next day I had this.

This time it was the same idea but instead of a platformer it would be a 2d brawler which I’ve actually made before but this still wasn’t quite fitting what I wanted.

Around 2pm I threw my hands in the air almost ready to give up, I conceded to playing some League of Legends and Diablo 3, and maybe that’s just what I needed…Ideas started spamming my brain and I got to animating and drawing the concept characters right away.  And now I have a working basic game with “cheat” physics and “pretend” logic, its almost like you have to be able to come up with ideas of how to make it look like its doing something extremely complex while just tricking the eyes by doing something much more basic.  Man I love Masks haha.

GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE! I got a whole day of animating and background design ahead of me :S

Phaux Out!

After a long day, a fair amount was accomplished.  I wish I could have obtained a better idea, but I am happy with what I have done.  Just have to adjust things, add sounds, better graphics, a few more mechanics and the game should be finished!

… I totally forgot to do this post 25 hours ago. So I’m just doing an underground platformer. I’m really behind atm. I’ve got the main character Sir Faec B.E.Neath animated for the most part, and I’ve made a primitive level editor.

I’m using:

LWJGL

GIMP + Paint + PyxelEdit

The only other LD I’ve completed was April ’13.

Food photo ! A light lunch of ham, cheese & egg toastie, coffee and a banana.

Tags: food, food photo, foodphoto

Commence day two!

I’ve found game soundtracks make excellent music to pixel and program to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLA0vB9LCTM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFkHbDd3qMs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05wiQQbFLU

This will probably be my last post before submitting my game. So far, I wasn’t sure what the game was going to be about. Well, not anymore. I’m 100% sure about what I want the game to be.

I’m keeping the use of personas (both on the usual sense and as a literal mask), but you shall choose which to wear to interact with a specific group. If you make a mistake, it’ll begin to break. After shattering, if you choose it again you act as your true self.

With that, I think I’ll be able to use the theme in a good way, and writing scenes won’t be as troubling. One thing that worry me is, how will the player know which persona to use? I’ll have to add some tip on the conversation…

Well, back to work! Goodbye, internet! Until I finish the game (or need to use the wiktionary again XD).

Word Digger!  play it online here: http://mcsdwvl.github.io/worddigger/build/build.html

Not sure where to go next or how to make it more fun!  It’s… ok.  Not the funnest thing ever, or super original, but kind of enjoyable. I fixed the colors which everyone who played (thanks for playing btw!) complained about:

I also added leaderboards, and, well, I beat your mom!

not sure what to do next.  Score multipliers?  More special tiles (on top of bombs)?  Music & SFX?  Better title screen? I feel like there’s something that could make it really fun that is just out of reach.

Slowly, but surely.

Crab and fish are animated now, though we’re still having some problems with our pipeline. Blender and UE4 don’t mix very well. I also keep getting distracted with minor unimportant things that are fun and make stuff pretty, but aren’t at all necessary or even central to the game. Game logic is still not fully done, but Lin is working hard on dapper crab’s guns. He just hates fish, that one.

Can I just stress what an awesome job J has done making and animating a crab in pretty much less than a day?

Tags: dapper crab

I’m giving up on my idea. I tried to do this theme, and it just didn’t work out. My final version is at this link, for all major desktop platforms, web, and Android.

Just a short post as we are quite tired, but we wanted to show what we’ve
gotten done at this point. Everything is coming along slowly but surely, and
were really happy with what we have so far.

Our progress so far

Good luck to everyone else in the competition and jam, and we can’t wait to see what you all create.

Working on some lighting and sound defects, to set a good eerie mood. Outside doesn’t look the best, I’m still working on the fog.

It’s gonna be a dungeon horror game. Hopefully I can get randomly generation of the dungeon finished before the deadline.

This is the second ludum dare my team has done and good thing this is turning out better than last time.

Last night I added a “story” at the start to explain what’s going on, and I added pew pew laser shooting from the player and gave the moon some shooting pattern and its first “phase.” Right now the game looks like it’s going to be a bullet hell-y moon shooting simulator and I’m happy with that for my first game I’ve made.

Moon shooting its pew pew lasers

You can play it here: http://qntnm.github.io/ld29/, sounds and other things may not work on Internet Explorer.

Here’s another gif for you to look at:

Day one over… not very far.

Simple mechanics working though: Physics, collecting fish, and shooting enemies:

Hello, all! I hope you’re having a good time coding in whatever time zone you’re in. I took a break for several hours this afternoon, but now I’m back, and I’ve added a new mechanic to my digging game: dirt piles! Exciting, huh? 😛

Now, when you dig holes, you now receive piles of dirt that you have to manage. They stack in piles of 3, but you can not access the tiles that they cover. You can also put dirt back into holes.

You can also rearrange treasures* that you dig up. This will come into play when I (hopefully) implement a bag to take items to the shop.

This new element of having to manage your space will make the game more tense when there is a time limit.

Good luck everyone!

So it’s been a long and busy, but fairly productive day. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Project Tethys

It’s an underwater shoot-and-rescue-em-up inspired by the likes of Defender and Resogun. You control a state-of-the-art combat submarine tasked with defending an underwater research facility from an invading army. Or at least, that’s what it should be if I can finish it in time…

The controls are arrow keys or WASD to move, left mouse button to fire.

There’s still loads left to do, but I think it feels like the beginning of a fun game. Hopefully at least some of you will agree. I wrote a blog post about it too, with a bit more info about what else I’m planning to add.

Can’t wait to see what everyone else is coming up with… after I get some sleep!

So i now have added the Oculus SDK into my project for my own enjoyment but also for those who have a rift!

Next on my list :

Player Damage

3 more dungeons

More Mobs

More Loot and objectives

Update the Main menu

Pause Menu

I’ve now implemented the choice dialogs so you can decide to focus on either the mine, the workers, or the town each week. Each focus has 3 further choices you can make which alter the stats in the system.

Well, I’ve been going about 14+ hours today so I think I’m going to wind down and then go to bed. I’ll see if I can’t wrap this thing up tomorrow in time for the compo deadline. I hope so!

Tags: Dialog, mines

My game is done!!!! Fuuuuuuuckk yeeeeee- well, there’s still sound effects, music and some polishing to do… so I would say it’s not 100%, hehehe. But! All the menus, stages and stuff are there. I dare say that’s enough reason to be happy. I need a little break. Like an hour or so. And food. Food is good n’ tasty.

Tags: 2d platformer, 2d unity, triorbis

So I totally forgot to post at all, because I’ve been working in all the free time I have, I think I’m just going to end up doing the Jam based on the fact I have a daughter and only get to work when she’s asleep.

But I’m still busting my ass to get this completed!

The game is a 2D Platformer about a kid who finds an underground drug ring, and he fights off the drug drealers, getting LSD (or aka Acid) from them!

I don’t want to ruin to much of the game, but YES, you will be able to do the acid you get 😉 (or sell it to various people for money to upgrade stuff).

A hidden void fractal enters the new universe…

Lots of sounds, lots of banging my head on my desk over rotations. STILL ZERO NON-CUBE GRAPHIX

Things happened, I started late, drat. Not a good start for my first Ludum Dare, however do have something to show for the few hours I have thrown in. The game is loosely inspired by The Binding of Isaac though at this stage doesn’t resemble it at all. I’m planning to add a cut scene or a few still images to explain what’s happening, but I haven’t got around to it yet, everything is much nicer with a few cut scenes so that is at high priority.

So far I’ve got a (sort of) menu screen, some basic game mechanics such as player movement, attacks and enemies though those remain very basic. Without further ado, here’s the pile of rubbish I’ve come up with so far.

Something

Controls – WASD to move, Arrows to shoot, you need to defeat a doubling number of enemies(e.g. 1,2,4,8,etc.) to unlock the door.

It’s easy to see that art is not my forte’…Oh well, the art is great for me

Still much to do, Ciao.

Adorable pirates seeking out riches and their inevitable graves beneath the surface of the ocean. Still working on main game mechanics and simultaneous Gui. Hopefully cross the finish line in time >< If not i have a nice project to finish in my spare time anyhow =)

Added a few more features like: lighting, maze stuff.

Here is some screenshots of my Tower Defence game. Coming soon!