the direct link goes to the gif not sure why it’s not animating in the post

So far, I’ve managed to finish:

• main character animations
• lighting
• movement
• particle effect
• tilemap background
• basic story outline

Here’s a screen show of the very ugly prototype.

From now, I’m going to work more on things like:

• fleshing out the story
• putting the story into the game
• thinking of a name
• making it look pretty
• making it fun

I’d say this will end up being less than 15 minutes long, but hopefully it will be very tidy.

This is my first Ludum Dare, so naturally I’m super excited to work on my project. Unfortunately, I’ve been running into some really dumb speed bumps. It seems that unity has no support for tile mapping out of the box, which is something I probably should have looked into. Instead of buying a solution from the asset store I’ve decided to use the tiled editor to make my world, and then export it as an image. So far this seems to be working well but is not ideal. However, I think I’ve already spent too much time on this aspect of the game.

Hopefully development picks up from here on out. Also here is a quick snapshot of where I’m at, in all its terrible programmer art glory. That is a chipmunk and a peanut, standing in a field of grass.

Finally got the canvas drawing sorted out. The game is set on a small moon or asteroid and is based on polar coordinates to minimize unnecessary calculations. It might get difficult to manage extra sprites and assets once they are added, but it’s working well so far!

The player’s rover has a drill to drill for resources:

But obstacles and hazards might have to be cleared out of the way first with the shockwave!

The placeholder graphics aren’t great, but they get the point across.

Ten hours in, and the game’s about half done.

The name is ‘Beneath the Surface’ (I know. Really creative). It’s a very short game about a father trapped underground in a coffin. It’s also very loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’. I’m aiming for a really surreal atmosphere, where players kept perpetually tense. Hopefully I could finish this game tomorrow afternoon.

So the theme that we decided on is similar to the myth of Scylla + Charybdis, with a bit of Siren thrown in.  You swim around the ocean trying to lure sailors to their deaths, by singing to them to placate them, then grabbing them and pulling them in.  You have to avoid getting hit by cannonballs that they fire at you, as well as managing your health and breath (which you spend to sing and swim underwater).

I’m making some good progress so far.  The tech demo thus far allows you to swim around and leap out of the water in a really satisfying way, and models your breath meter correctly.  The next thing is to work on is generating boats with cannons and sailors attached.

This is my second ludum dare – the first one was really fun for me. This time around I am alone and will try to enter the competition. I will be using PlayCanvas. My twitter handle is @vkalpias.

Good luck everybody!

Here’s my base code. Just about to dive into coding, and I hadn’t decided what programming language I was going to use until now. BSD license, about 1.6k lines of C++ with SDL and OpenGL.

http://moria.us/ludumdare/ld29/ldbase.tar.gz

Hopefully I’ll get to work on this more before the deadline, I think there’s a game in there somewhere 😛 YouTube vid with GAMEPLAY HERE

Hours Passed: 5

Local Time: 10:54PM

Fatigue Level: 5%

Art/Code Completed: 10% / 5%

Just spent the last 4 hours or so working on the art style. Minimal coding so far except a basic project setup and Animation class.

My strategy right now is to keep the complexity to a minimal. No need for much collision for this game except floor and roof. More could be added at the end.

Right now I’m just trying to decide whether to keep working until I drop or go to bed…

Concept- “Metro Lancer”

Your mission to blow up enemy positions from the underground metro system. Your equipment allows you to ride the tracks, as well as detach any time to fight mid-air.

Fight through the enemy underground defenses to get beneath their aboveground positions!

Concept art so far:

Tags: chickens are awesome, Long live the holy chicken

I’ve decided on an idea.

It’s called Subcutaneous Explorer and it will be related to exploring things inside the human body. It may include combat.

Since I have mastered the art of pushing buttons in Github (I always had a lot of trouble with git), I’ll be placing the code here:

https://github.com/trollkatt/SubcutaneousExplorer

Wow, for the first two hours I was really sweating this theme.  I blame the pre-thinking I did before the compo.

I went in with the idea that I would do a top-down game with some sort of combat, and I would design the mechanics around the theme.  But “Beneath the Surface” has a few contradictions with a top-down perspective.

My first-five-minutes idea was this:  There are tiles/cards on the battlefield, and you can flip them to find out what’s beneath.

That’s it!  I even drew a little man, who accidentally turned out to be a cowboy.  So a cowboy was flipping cards that did something, to help him do something.

I was not pleased, because I like to have a physical mechanic at the core of the game.  Inspiration was not striking.

I opened a blank notepad and just dumped a slew of ideas into it, mostly trash.

But then I struck on one.  The moon of Jupiter, Europa, has water and is thought to potentially support life in our solar system.

So here’s the deal:  Europa has melted, and you are there in a spacecraft that can fly in the air and in the water.  The trick is that while you’re in the air, you are being dragged down by gravity.  When you are in the water, you are being pushed up by buoyancy.

You have a limited amount of thrust that barely competes with these forces when you oppose them, but you can influence the bobbing wave path that results from the alternating forces.

You’ll have to ride this wave, using your jets to adjust your path, avoiding obstacles and probably doing the obvious thing of shooting guns at hostile aliens.

After a horrifying 20 minutes where I forgot to turn off the “Apply Root Motion” option of the Unity 2D animator (what an insane default to turn on, it WRECKS your physics completely!), I have implemented the bobbing ship.

Next task is to implement some form of level generator with icebergs you must avoid.  Then I’ll have enough to see if the fun is actually fun.

This is what i got from the 5 first hours of work ! Some rest now before going back in a few hours

Made some great progress tonight. Got all the core interactions working. Still lots to do, but I think this might turn out to be a playable thing by Sunday night.

Hooray!

I was at work while the competition started and just got home and ate, so I’m doing my here’s-the-old-code-I’m-using post now.

It’s your basic update-loop function, and collision-detection, and animation, and… stuff. Anyone who’s using a system like Unity or a nice code-library actually has a lot more going on than I do, but I just like the idea of using my own code. But actually, I’m not actually sure I’m using all of this; for example, I plan on using balls instead of squares for the entities in this game, so Hitbound.js won’t be what I use. Or at least, it won’t be ALL I use.

I liked the Control More Than One concept, so I’ll be using that somehow. I was also a huge fan of that one game, Desert Worm or Death Worm or whatever it was called. I’d like to put a twist on it, though… I’ll see what I can come up with.

Since my idea revolved around being underground and using natural light for guidance, I needed to create a decent lighting engine. So here is what the game looks like so far, without shadows (yet!):

I’m using OpenGL + GLSL in Java, via LWJGL. And I’m streaming here: twitch.tv/TheCherno

I’m entering Ludum Dare 29. I have an idea for a game, I don’t know if I can make it work though.

Tools and stuff I’ll be using:
> FlashDevelop
> Flashpunk
> Tiled
> GraphicsGale, GIMP
> bxfr
> goldwave
> Musagi, pxTone or cgMusic

 
This is some base code I’ll be starting with.
Download

Tags: as3, flash, flashpunk

It`s 10:01 in Saint-Petersburg, so good morning ludum darists (or whatever time of the day you need).
Glad to see an interesting theme – that`s the best new for this time.
I`ve missed previous LD, but still want to have the same fun i had while LD26 and 27.

I`m packed with Construct2 and Photoshop, quite enough for me to make a good game.

Good luck and good ideas to everyone. Lets do it! (or “keep doing!”)

Tags: ld29, yozzik

I’ve got the asset creation pipeline down, and I’ve upgraded to the 30-day trial of Unity Pro in order to use pretty effects.  It’s a game about elephants.  Or more accurately, it’s a game about everything that isn’t the elephant.

Pretty obvious concept, but it should be fun and maybe a little challenging.  It’s going to be challenging to make, at any rate.  I’ve never done organic 3D modeling before.