“Mom, why the houses are on fire?”

“Just pack quickly Anya….”

I should really learn how to animate fire… but so many things to do yet >.<

We are doing a moody mystery point n click adventure game that takes place in a sci-fi cyberpunk setting. We are using pixel art and could really use some chiptune or similarly style medium for our point n click adventure. If anyone is interested, or has some questions, respond here.

Hi everyone !

It’s been quite a difficult beggining for us since our game designer is in vacation ^^’

Yet we’ve been talking and we have a cool game concept (yay) ! As far as I’m concerned I made a cool splash screen with a kickass particle effect

We’ll focus on gameplay tomorrow and Monday !

Here’s our tools :

Code editor : Atom

Music : Milkytracker

Graphics : Aseprite

See you later ;P

After spending way too much thinking about what game I was aiming to make, I pretty much have idea in place. The hard part (this guy) is over…. for now… muahahahaahahahaha…. coz…hahaahaha… I am…. a monster.. hahahahaha.

But seriously, follow my instagram and twitter. I post updates there first.

Tags: 2D, compo, game, jam, kidando, ld48, progress, screenshot

Taking part in the 72hr jam this year rather than the 48hr compo. Using unity again but going for a 2D game so most my work will be done in photoshop, maybe some in maya.

Here’s my main protagonist

See him move here:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTH85T4zqbs

HiVE interactive, staying up so late for LD #33.

ALIENSCHE!

Language: C#
Engine: Unity3D w/ UnIDE
Art: Photoshop or 3ds Max
Audio: Gameboy w/ LSDJ + Audacity

My monster!

Tags: dinosaur, godzilla, monster

Overworld objects!

. 

I’m starting to have a feeling I may not complete the compo in time. However, I’m learning a lot more than I expected.

making a game called HUGE DOG. it’s about a dog that gets really big and steps on everything and then it steps on itself in the past and turns into an even bigger dog and then that dog gets hit by a dog bus that is barking “YOU YOU YOU YOU” and then the dog bus hits another dog bus and mashes up into an even BIGGER dog and that dog just cries for a long time until you cheer it up by giving it a hot dog.

using gamemaker 8.1, nitrotracker for nintendo DS, audacity.

Things are beginning to come together. This is a basic overview of my first level and obviously these are just basic art types so i can get a feel for things. Tomorrow is going to busy day because my programming tool wasn’t working this morning. Tomorrow I need to add animations for pretty much everything, particles, all the levels, different enemy types, different time zones, different monsters and general polish and making things better along with a couple of late night ideas thrown in. I have implemented a system in which, if you die then everything gets reset including enemies and stars. This adds extra challenge to the game and it was there unintentionally and i don’t really know how to fix it but i think it is a fun and challenging game play element but if you don’t like the idea then just let me know before i go full blown with the idea :P. Take from the screenshot what you will but i can semi promise you that it will look a lot better when the game is finally able to be played.

Also 1 last note: This is first time adding music into my game and since i don’t think i can get any open source stuff off the internet i will be making it myself so please don’t judge me or it if it kills your ears 😛 but I’ll go now.

Quite a lot more time spent on this compo than last time, which I’m certainly proud of. So far, I’ve created several rooms and have developed a bit of a story in my head. The idea is that you’re a misunderstood ghost, and eventually find happiness. I’ve been using Java and LWJGL, so I’m on familiar-ish ground. Here are some screenshots:

Tags: java, lwjgl

It’s my first Ludum dare, and I’m satisfied so far. Can someone help me display the timer and score on screen with unity, as you can see I couldn’t figure it out. That’s would be very nice.

I’ve got a somewhat good idea of what I’ll be doing with my second stage. I’ve also decided to make it so that certain monsters will attempt to attack you and have thus decided to add a stealth mechanism where the player can hide behind certain objects to hide from hostile monsters (such as the spikes and pillars from the previous stage and the badly drawn bush in this one). Without further ado, here is my current concept for stage two (it rhymed so you know it’s meant to be):

I plan on recreating the BATMON (enemy from the previous stage, the cave) into a bird version for it to make more sense to have it out in broad daylight. I’ve also already designed a new monster in addition to having an idea for another. I know it’s a bit ambitious especially for my skill level and the time constraint, but I really want to have a lot of monsters with a variety of different stages. Or maybe I can make several reskins of the same monsters. I don’t know right now so I’ll figure it all out as I go.

After the last update I went and had some breakfast and lost a bit of traction. Ended up flailing around with blender for a bit, but ended up figuring some stuff out.

I’m not entirely where I want to be with the mechanics but, It’s still looking good.

Still have to get the item mechanics working properly, UI stuff and then later I’ll work on making the terrain generation better.

There’s still some place-holder sprites visible in this screenshot, but the game’s definitely starting to take shape.

Behold Glauron, son of Glaurung, First of the Winged Dragons!

Well, okay, the wings aren’t there yet, and neither are most of the other sprites… but I’m extremely happy with how my dragon turned out.

You have to see it in motion to appreciate it, but I don’t have time to figure out how to make a GIF. So you’ll just have to try it out for yourself. Feedback welcome, via the comments or via Twitter!

Hi! Just a quick post to show some stuff. Still have a long ways to go…

If you don’t know, my game’s called click-bait simulator so I made a graph to show how many views your posts have:

Watch me stream my gamedev: http://www.hitbox.tv/BtheDestroyer

The main game mechanic is working perfectly. It had a lot of problems earlier, but it’s going just fine for now.

I’ve got the whole game pretty much wrapped up- in record time! Well, for me at least…

This LD is a first for me- despite having entered 4 times previously, this is the first time in which I have created my own music. An OST will be included with the game.

Despite having the game pretty much finished, there’s still a lot of polishing to do. The boss battle isn’t quite fun just yet, and I need to add menus/game states for death/wins/title etc. I also need to finish the boss death animation and add sounds before I’m done.

Here’s the screenshot of the boss battle room:

Working on explosions. Lots of fun.

My lunch in an airplane.

So, now I’m doing the Jam, my 7-year-old son has been working on art for the game all morning.  Here is the title screen:

So progress has been good for our first LD using new tools, there has been beer and pizza. So far so good.

You are an ogre trying to eat babies, with bonus points for mutilations.

Currently includes :

• Scrolling platform world
• Patrolling enemies
• Enemies have sight and pursue if they spot you
• Game end on being caught
• Background music
• Full Scoring
• Particle emitter for blood
• Animated characters

Next things on the list include better level and sound effects

Didn’t do a lot, but enough for today. Here you have all graphics I need at the moment. Once I finish the game I can tune the graphics making them more beautiful.

See you tomorrow.

The game is about to take shape, I’m just at a stage where I decide the way the game is to be played. The idea is to kill kittens, as that would obviously make you a killer. I just need to decide can it be a puzzle game, with killing cats, simple arcade game with a timer?

At the minute I’m making an arcade game, where kill as many kittens in 1 min as possible. Then the game may develop into something bigger, but that’s a time thing, and probably won’t happen. Anyway, I’m trying to keep it minimal this time around.

I made a small HUD (the blue used isn’t the final colour), which will track kittens killed, and time left.

I did some coding. I’m not even rusty, I’m a complete amateur. However managed to make character and camera movement in the end. Here is how it looks like. She is alive! (Reminding again that this is going to become a point & click adventure game about a little girl, Hope. She is *SPOILERS*)

Got the player movement feeling good—it’s just an approach function with upper and lower bounds on the effective speed. The background looks nicer without 256-color GIF compression.

Still working with placeholders, but the smashThatKid() method is working properly.

I’m getting nowhere slowly.

At the very least my Monster looks badass. (considering I have ZERO graphics experience and I’m purely a programmer doing Ludum Dare for the first time.)

After working all night trying to get my tile engine up and running (working in C++) I decided to put that on hold for another time and actually attempt to finish a game this weekend. I’ve decided I’m just going to be using Unity 5 instead of messing around with an unfinished game engine that I’ve worked on here and there so I can actually get a finished game, or at least a prototype that I could possibly expand on later if I like it enough.

I’ll be streaming again today: twitch.tv/icedmetal57

My explosion is rendering.

Took a break from the game to make a pretty menu.

“The graphizs man, it’s all about the graphikss…”

I hope I finish in time though, this thing takes forever to animate.

– Kakureta

We started at 10:30 this morning (GMT) with nothing, and now we have a functional movement / collision / attack mechanic, a whole bunch of tiles to make a snazzy map, and a couple of working sprites (albeit a little oversized). On the whole, its been a very successful day, it seems like we’ve got loads done in very little time. We’ve been streaming the progress on Twitch all day, and will do the same tomorrow. Until then, I’ll be slowly working on new graphics, and posting updates on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. But what you really want to see right now are pictures, right?

Took me two failed ideas and prototypes last time to come up with something half decent (well, indecent to be exact…). This time I just gave up after those two failed ideas and prototypes and went for a joke low effort funny entry. At least now I can rate all of your games! Yay!

Things tried:

• 2.5D Brawler with the message that whether someone or something is a monster or not depends only on the viewpoint. So basically the plot of “Monsters”. Hated that movie.
• GIANT SPACE CAT WITH EYE LASER OHMYGOD. Meh. We all know cats can’t be monsters!

Things submitted:

• Monster can-can. A “game” designed specifically to kill your spacebar. Looks like this in action (if the gif works…):

It’s been ten years since I’ve attempted pixel art the last time. It took me hours to get this generated map to actually look nice with each iteration.

I can finally start actually thinking on the gameplay.

I’ve got the steering, jumping and camera down almost completely now, and have begun working on the graphics!

Jumping on other monsters to kill them.

Main character mesh

Tags: update

Update! It’s been going great so far. Just taking a break from the “game” game and just making fun stuff. Like these exploding fire extinguishers 😀

Click to see it in action!

Moved to 3D.

Now on how to spice it up to look like a destructable city and not a cube town.

Sadly these get pixelated to hell in the post but they look very sharp and pixely normally
That’s all folks, I won’t show more spoopy art until release 😛

Hello guys. We are two dudes, who trying to make awesome game. Have fun, making you games, guys!

BEWARE THE FLAPPY MONSTER

So after deciding to roll with the “sneaking” game idea I’ve begun to make good progress on the gameplay. Our character can move and “sneak”, slowing his pace and he dies when entering the brighter section of the lights. In addition, I am putting some final tweaks on my super-basic node-based path system. I’ve yet to test it out with multiple enemies and it needs a function to help it loop.

Here is a look at that in action (the red diamonds will be hidden in the final version):

Once I have pathing fine tuned we can start to attach lights to our enemies! Let’s keep up the pace and I might actually get this one done!

All the games people are making look fantastic – really excited for some of the Donald Trump themed ones. ;-D

We’re still streaming this puppy live at http://twitch.tv/thoughtreactorlive, so come check out the progress!

Here is a screenshot of me testing various features. Including UI and particles. (And sound)

HanniBall is coming along

Tags: HanniBall, webgl

So created sounds effects and a music track for my game. Adds so much atmosphere!
Finally put the monster effect into the game. Quite happy with the progress being made! Despite the initial trouble with the theme.

After a break I’ll be back to add more to the town and more gameplay!

Before Monster. (Particle effects added)

Monster mode!

Tags: LD #33, TheCure

… and I’m going to be including code from a GBA emulator I wrote earlier this year! My idea was to put together a FFT-alike game where you, as a lvl 1 monster, must gather allies, improve their skills, and finally take on the big bad to become the big bad yourself. All in sweet, sweet emulated GBA mode 1/2 (aka Mode 7).

Like many people here I’m not much of an artist. Hopefully I have enough time at the end of the compo to tidy up some of the graphics. Good luck everyone!

The only major thing missing is the Story “Mode”.
We have to start recording for that soon, but this was the fastest LudumDare, I’ve ever worked on. (out of three)

If you want to have a look at the current version or want to have the source code feel free to visit: Game (TiByte.net)
 More information at: Info (TiByte.net)

We ended up using: Pixel.JS, Howler.JS, and a lot of JavaScript.
The “obligatory” tools used were: Audacity, GIMP, Sublime Text3 (with a lot of Plugins).
Sadly we couldn’t keep the livestream running, because of audio problems with the keyboard.
(OS: Ubuntu | Had Chronolapse running all day… looking forward to the video)

Good Luck to everyone!
Greetings from Germany

Hi, so uhm.. this is a little progress on our game 😀

Also say hi to the main character of the game, the “Monster”. He is a badass that kicks ass. Well, at least I think he is going to be

So this is a running motion we made, and thought we’d share it with you guys!! 😀

Here is day 1 report! It’s been a long day and in last 4 hours I could have done more. I lost focus quite ofter

I actually added some day-night cycle, but it does not affect what you see. Also added a working analog clock on bottom bar. Aaand finally, I started to work on monster AI! If you hover over monster, you can see what it is saying or thinking. Messy text is because of video resizing. You can see 3 different situations in gif below:

1. There is no reception. Monster will turn away, say “How can this hotel be without lobby?” and walk away.
2. Monster will come to reception. There is no room left so it will say a quote. Walk away is planned for tomorow.
3. As you can see, I have built a guest rooms. Monster will come to reception, get a room and give you money.

Tags: day 1, hotel, progress

Hi to all girls and boys participating at Ludum Dare and not, i’ve created a simple tool for creating maps for my upcoming game, if someone is interested please create a map and send me mappa.txt file in the comments or on twitter, i’ll probably use it in the final game :D, the gameplay is non existent, but it’s enough to say that will be a dungeon crawler

Some tips:

left click puts obstale

right click remove it

esc to esc and save

borders are already obstructed in the game, no need to put wall around them

Here the link and thanks for the attention https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B548D60Cd4JVV3RNcmNReTd5ZjA/view?usp=sharing

So, i have some progress and feature cut, i guess. I’d finished all level pattern and main content, next day to polish+music+stylish and upgrades with online stats 😀
I lay down to my bed on second and go asleeep. Damn)

HiVE interactive, off to bed for now. Many progress – click for movement!

Goodnight! <3

So, the first day is finishing for me. I haven’t done really much; I had to think for a while the idea before starting to code and I got a little distracted with something, but anyways I wrote about 600 lines of code. Here’s what I have done, if you’re interested in playing a very incomplete version: http://www.fastswf.com/onTZpZ4 (the graphics are provisional, althrough I don’t know if I’ll have time to improve them. By the way, you must interact with the “black spray thing” and collect oil drops in order to be able to defeat the enemies).

So, the game (which I may call “The Monster’s Cave”) is about a princess who runs away from her castle because she doesn’t want to marry her cousin. She hides in a cave, but people think she’s been kidnapped by an evil monster and come to rescue her. Then the princess must pretend to be the monster to scare them away. The game is of the tower defense/time management genre: the princess has a time to “prepare the cave” before knights come to rescue it. It might look like it doesn’t fit the theme very much; I’ll try to fix that with a more detailed explaination and better graphics.

I added a couple of levels (6 in total, have to improve this tomorrow), added sounds, added some animations and fixed some bugs.

So here some screenies. Good night.

Well its taken me until now to come up with even a loose idea, but still plenty of hours left

I’ll be using Unity.

Good luck all!

Got a lot done last night, not the least of which was animating almost all my sprites!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B04XtDB-xAKKbzFZZkUtSTk5cUU/view?usp=sharing

This is my main character, Echidna! I’ll post a more coherent update after coffee… and a couple hours of work. Good morning, everyone, and good luck on day 2!

I spent most of the day with animations and fixing bugs in the animation framework I use.
I didn’t get much done in terms of actual gameplay and that’s actually not so good because my scope was already very ambitious.
At least I am kind of liking how things look and even the animations aren’t as bad as they were in the beginning. Who knew humanoids are so difficult to animate! (I kind of did, but yeah …)
I hope I get a minimal version of the actual story implemented tomorrow.
Good luck!

I’m probably posting this way too late for anyone to care, but I feel like saying stuff anyways. After participating in my first LD, whenever I didn’t participate again it was because I was extremely busy with school and/or work, and generally in a stressed/uneasy state of mind. That also meant I barely had the time to play any of submitted games or even play the winners until much later. I’m not participating this LD either, but I’m happy to say it’s not for the same reason. Things have been fairly hectic for the last few months, but in a good way, as I’ve been occupied with good, meaningful work since graduation; have had time to catch up with family and friends; all that good stuff. So although I’ve been busy, I’ve been enjoying it and have been learning a lot, and I’m nowhere near the stressed-out state I was in during the last few LDs. Things have been settling down as of late so I finally have free time again, but nonetheless, I’m completely out of practice and have to sit this one out.

However! Now that I actually have time to breathe, I’ll be playing the role of spectator. I plan to hop on the IRC and see what people are up to, maybe test out some games, learn from other people’s ideas (which I could really use, actually), and I’ll likely be streaming gameplay footage come submission time (as if anyone cares about what I have to say). It might not mean much but I enjoy being a part of things somehow, and I really do have a lot to learn about game design and may as well take the time to observe.

Good luck to all those participating!

(Click to play the gifs…)

This is so much fun! Even if nobody plays the game, I sure as hell enjoyed making it.

A different human:

Tags: LD33

“Tribute” is coming along. Assets are getting into the game as they arrive. Unfortunately, this pass will not permit much polish. The action-group scroll menus are working and looking nice. Add a few helmets and skulls, and game is starting to look like a website from 1998. Maybe we could revive the old webrings?

In “Tribute”, Players get 2 actions a turn (month). These actions are selected from the action scrolls along the bottom of the screen. There are plenty of options. And with these, I’ve discovered some interesting scenarios.

Each region displays its food and wealth. But you might see a bug here — the RNG has the Farmland producing 3 Food, while the Swamp produces 6. That needs fixing.

Also, I still need to consider how to display a region’s terror level (if at all). There are also additional icons for the Player’s monster, the Player’s monster’s lair, traveling NPCs, armies, etc.

And to keep things simple, I’m doing this in HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.

I did get a few hours of much needed sleep. But my schedule is off now.

The first 6 hours of design took 7.5 hours.

The scheduled 12 hours of asset creation is still in progress and is currently at 13+ hours.

The 24 hours of programming and 6 hours of cleanup will require a review. There’s about 28 hours left, so I’m still confident that this can be done.

Good Luck Everyone,
Charles K.

This is the main game screen, obviously work in progress.

Let’s see how this pans out, or if it’s even fun once I start playing it…

Check out the player character from our entry!

Getting there!

So, I’ve got a basic level setup, some nice textures and basic following AI

making some progress

you can view my live stream Here!!

Cheers guys
AV

Is it allowed to use the Unity standard assets effects package for the compo?

First up a confession – I hate this theme. A lot. Really, a lot.

But having got over the urge to rehash an old video game from the monsters’ perspective I decided to go with you are the monster as in you are doing acts against nature…

Completed (mostly):

• Concept
• Mechanics
• Scripting

Left to do:

• All the in-game graphics
• All the in-game sound
• Spit and polish

NOT going for the compo as I’ve used third party assests, a smidgen. Plus I want the extra day.

Below is a sample from the title screen…

More to report at the end of day two.

Not a lot of progress but at least i’ve got a Stamina Circle (?)

Good Luck everyone!

Even before we have finished anything, we launch our goodies selling campaign !
Get these for 25.99$ (excluding shipping charges)

(The final product may not look like this)

Stay tuned for the DLC anouncement tomorrow !!

You read the title. Here it is! My day one recap!

So, this is how my day went:

• PAST
• I dreamed about the theme announcement
• I woke up
• I checked the theme
• I wrote a post about my dream
• Had a shower
• Had breakfast
• Went to my computer and opened up the LD33 project
• Made some basic graphics for the player
• Made a level loader
• Had lunch
• Started making a turret
• Got stuck on rotation
• Finally found a tutorial
• Implemented it into my game
• Made bullets
• Made turrets shoot every one second
• Compressed everything into a spritesheet
• Coded a spritesheet loader
• Implemented the spritesheet loader
• Ate all the Oreos in the box
• Went on IRC for a bit
• Had dinner
• Started to code attacks
• Wrote this post
• FUTURE
• Finished the attacks
• Made some levels
• Went to sleep
• REPEAT

Well after working on my game all yesterday it’s time for day 2! I over slept a bit thanks to me being lazy but it’s fine cause it’s still really early. Hope everyone’s game is going great! I was unsure about my game yesterday but when I played it again today I was really proud of it. Still heaps more work to do so I better go! GoodLuck to everyone!

I’ve made a game where you are the bad guy but the others don’t know at first. For no reason you need to do many evil things. However you should be careful that nobody sees you or otherwise they would kick you out of the group and you won’t get to the precious /dev/null machine! This is how it looks:

Gameplay

Draft

You won’t be forgotten

HOLY **** YOU ARE ZOMBIES!??

Here is a first look to my solo project, which definitely looks like a medieval game, no spoil

Good luck everyone !

This is my first Ludum Dare. In my debut entry, you are literally Hitler in the fateful entrance exam and paint pictures against time and Hitler’s anxiety and scary visions. What you paint gets compared to a reference image. This here is a modified photograph of fruits I took today. It was manipulated to look paintable using only primary colours. Painting already works, but the… other elements are to be added.

I’m using love2d, Gimp, and vim – they have worked exceptionally well so far.

Pew pew kaboom pew! Explosions implemented!

Day one is done and I am not unhappy with the result. I had a bit of a problem coming up with a good concept, but I kept coming back to the same idea. I was not convinced by it, but it was impossible to get my mind off it. Because of not being convinced by the idea I had some struggles getting things to work, but once I had a simple AI going and had to actually run away from adventurers trying to collect my spoils, I actually saw things coming together a bit.

Anyway, I actually have sort of a playable game already. This was exactly my goal: get something playable the first day and do all the polishing on day two. The most important tasks for tomorrow will be handling the game state nicely (“Debug.Log(‘You lost’)” is not gonna cut it for the final version), writing a bit of a UI and tutorial and of course making proper graphics.

I had a bit of a scare about an hour ago when the game suddenly stopped running, even on older versions in Git, right at the point where I said to myself “enough for today, let’s make my day one builds”. Of course Unity thought this to be the best time to teach me about script execution order being completely arbitrary. That’s what happens if your code turns into this monstrosity of ugly code.

Either way, with that fixed, I am going to call it a day. There are probably several people that are going to work until deep in the night using some Monster energy (see what I did there!?), but I am taking it relaxed and easy today. I don’t think I have the killer idea that’s going to win, so I might as well take an easy pace.

If the animation above is not enough, the day one builds plus instructions can be found on my personal blog. Good night to you all!

Tags: compo, game, journal, progress, screenshot, unity, unity3d, update

I’ve finished a playable prototype!

Complete with collision detection, win condition, sound effects, and re-play feature. Also the level is being generated from an image.

It’s playable! Try it out!

Hello, here it is !

We have a Demo !

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25031127/LudumDare33/builds.html

since its an unity webplayer it will only run on firefox and explorer.

just basic controls. asdw + space.

View post on imgur.com

Just a little fun with shaders:) (won’t be in the final game!^^)

Hello all,

Had a sleep break, woke up and ate and am now ready for the push into the night. Going to start UI and HUD in a minute but thought I would take a moment to build lighting, back up an exe, write a post and prepare for the next bit of work. Made a task list of quick things to do after the hud so I expect a lot of progress before midnight.

Here is a moody shot of my current location!

Enjoy

Gosh, I still haven’t done any gameplay yet… but it will work out… somehow… XD

LeBlane has spent the day trying to get sprites to work, and now has that going, and we have a ‘city’ thing.

The backend now has city data and … well it has the data, returning it isn’t in yet, but will be first thing.

Go home, sleep, fix backend, then LeBlane will get here a bit later and we’ll see where we get before noon.

Alright time for some updates. I have finished making all the core characters. That’s the one you see in the screenshot plus three others. The UI will basically be laid out like you see. I’m currently coding in all the things that make a fighter a fighter and I’ve made plenty of progress. With some luck I might have some gameplay to show off before I go to sleep.

Day one: I haven’t done anything I wanted to, but for a first time it’s not bad, we’ll see tomorrow if I can finish this game.
My feeling about the ludum dare: very excited (too much).

Definitely getting a bunch done….

Particle FX are slowing us down some as our particle man decided to take a 9hr siesta.

Anyway…here are a few shots….

Haven’t settled on a name for the game yet……

but our team name this year is definitely Abusement Park PDX!

Will update again later and we will probably do a Twitch stream tomorrow.

Hope everyone is enjoying themselves!

Didn’t know there was one going on this weekend.

It has been a while but I am going to see if I can submit a game.

Starting late but hopefully it won’t matter.

glhf

We have now added game states, sound effects, a few improvements.

But most importantly we have a working version online, still early days, but it’s playable … kind of

Unnamed HTML5 Game

A little bit of pixel art progress, I’m already running out of noodles and cereal   any criticism is welcome.

Bob the Monster

This is Bob. A vicious and terrifying monster.

Looks like I’m making a PICO-8 game after all. Flying dragons are cool! So is gold. Gold is shiny and in this case bright yellow.

But seriously, I have a pretty good idea where I’m going with this.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this initially, but it’s coming together!

I plan on polishing the gameplay today, and trying my best to make it pretty tomorrow!

Play Monster Machine!

Monster Machine is finished.  And I gotta say I feel great about the work I did.  I planned it very well, got plenty of sleep, was able to improve my artwork, and finish the game with plenty of time to spare.  I had a fantastic time doing all this too – even as 2 am hit last night I had plenty of energy.  The last few iterations of Ludum Dare just didn’t seem to do it for me – this one was totally different.  I’m really glad I had the time to put in this.  Now lets go over some game.

Reactor Incremental – a unique incremental game.

My game is Monster Machine!, an incremental int eh style of Reactor Incremental  If you’ve ever played Reactor Incremental you’ll know what I’m taking about.  Its a fairly unique incremental in that you can place your production buildings, and there are a variety of effects by placing certain units adjacent to others.  I wanted to replicate this in a game of my own for some time, and this presented a great opportunity to do so.  Truth be told I was going to go this route and let the theme fall where it will.  I like my adaptation; my original game design was nothing like this one.

So at 9pm Friday I started.  It was easy to create the initial grid and mouse mappings.  Making this setup and initial configuration very easy was ImpactJS, a JavaScript game engine that I will stand by forever.  I bought a license for this engine almost 5 years ago for $99, and I have got that value back many times over.  Its easy to set up a game quickly, and the built in Entity framework makes handling entities easy.  Using that framework I was able to get structures placed on the game grid quickly, getting two of the three structures working by the first night’s end.

Drawing Tablet – a life-saver!

Further speeding up my work was a drawing tablet, a first for me.  In all LDs before I used a mouse to draw graphics and my game appearance inevitably suffered.  Some people have that gift – I certainly do not.  Even with a tablet my art is sub-par – but this time its my brand of sub-par.  The mouse is also quite slow by comparison, and filling in small details like shading and extra scary teeth are tough.  With the tablet I was able to get my art done – and then some.  I was able to create multiple variations of each building so your map wasn’t so uniform, and each structure is animated to create a nice living (or undead) map.  I was also able to add some nice particle-like effects, made easy with the tablet.  I would recommend one to anyone.

Music Generator – This place is the bee’s knees.

Another pitfall for my games is music and sound.  These can turn a good game into a great one – the atmosphere music provides is immense.  In the past I’ve tried making my own, but no way no how.  I’m no good on the keyboard and I have no experience with electronic music, so I stuck with some simple Python music generation.  It didn’t ever really mesh.  For this LD, I tried the Fake Music Generator.  And you should too.  The music that place comes up with blows me away – and I was even able to find a set of tracks that matched my atmosphere perfectly.  Sounds were simple this time around – only a building placement and build removal sound were needed.

The final result is one I am very proud of – the first one since my December 2012 entry, Unleashed – coincidentally from the ‘You are the Villain’ LD.  Let’s not get into the theme selection anyway.  I’m always glad to participate in LD, but when I complete a project start to finish, I feel so much better about the weekend.

An early game screen with some buildings placed.

The first day of the contest is slowly reaching its end and I’m thinking of having some sleep. I should be able to finish my game in time even if it is still not a game so far. Here’s a little gif showing different kind of mechanics :