Finished Northern Spy (Exploration, LD 16)

I have a vague sense of foreboding.

Thing is done. Last few hours were intense. I haven’t played the whole game yet, so it may be totally off here or there. Let me know of any major trip ups, if you decide to give it a try.

Game is about navigating a maze while running along the ceiling. Or something. Play it.

Grab some tiny pixel font here.

Tags: final, screenshot

realistically. I did not have as much time as I hoped to actually work on my project.

Shoot for the stars

Here’s the link for more info. Kind of simple and fun 3 levels in total.

The submission page is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=412.

Windows & Source | Registration | High Scores

It’s some sort of MMO thingy. Arrow keys to move, space to minimap, esc to quit, mouse for other stuff
Because of the disjoint nature of the game, someone else might have claimed a hill before you get there. You’ll know this has happened because when you get there, you won’t hear the trumpety noise.

= Tools =
Language: C++
Libraries: Allegro, Libcurl, and my Allegro classes (included)
IDE: Code::Blocks
Sound: Sfx
Music: Stockboy to compose and Audacity to record
Graphics: The GIMP, Paint
Datafile: Allegro Grabber utility

Contact me in IRC if you can do an OS/X or Linux port for me.

This weekend was awesome! But also exhausting. I already thought, that i will not be able to finish anything — mainly because my plan somehow ended by a game playable just by 3 handed people, able to walk and interact with the game with keyboard and use the third hand for triggering sound effects and other things with mouse. But thankfully I just dropped almost all of this ideas away and worked last 12 hours almost solely on design and graphics. And i was still able to post my game just 3 minutes before deadline, so maybe i should have done it sooner…

Some random thoughts:

I’m sure that i’ve written the ugliest code in my life — i see almost only hard-coded text, switch statements (which i don’t like at all) and misuse of the language…

It was first time, i have tried to do some animation and it looks really unnatural, but i’m still relatively satisfied with it — next time it will be better. But first i have to find better sprite editor — paint.net isn’t really build to work with animations and dos-like allegro sprite editor is also not THE ideal program for me…

Besides animation, i also never tried to compose some music or create sound effects. I was looking toward it, but i didn’t manage to have time to do sfx, so this is my goal for next compo — create game that is not mute 😀

Preparation! I spent most of the time to learn to work with allmost everything i used. But it will be better next time…

I was happy to take part in this competition, and ‘m looking forward to play some of games created here… see you next time again

The game is here

Wowzers, that was quite the ride! I’m proud of what I was able to do. Even though it’s not much of a game, but its kinda fun.

Play it HERE:  http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LudumDare48.swf

Controls Below

W/A/S/D to move around

E  Builds improvements (lumberyard on forests, farm on grasslands, mine on mountains)

R to build Roads

T to build boat houses, you can use a boat house as a town.

You have to connect your improvements with roads.
Wagons run if you connect roads up, you get gold when your wagons are running!
I’m compiling a Timelapse and I want to fraps together some game play footage.

My timelapse is here!

YouTube
Timelapse dead link now

Tags: ld16, timelapse

Well, my game isn’t half of what I’d planned, but it’s at least playable, just one level. Jimmy was going to be a mouse, but I didn’t have time to draw his sprites so now he’s that yellow thing. As you explore the level you will find power-ups that will help you get further. There was no time for sound unfortunately.

I had never used Flixel before and I’m glad to have tried it out. I did spend a lot of the time learning it, so I could probably have done a lot better if I had studied it before the LD started. This was also the first time I used as3 instead of haXe and I must say I do prefer the haXe language.

Anyway, I’ll probably use Flixel again next time, and then I won’t have to learn it first, so I might actually finish a complete game…

You can play the game here:

• Play Jimmy’s Adventure

Hey, it’s a game! And I happened to decide to call it Echolon for no real good reason.

This game was made in around 8 hours today after ditching most of the work I did for another game yesterday. The theme of exploration was so broad I had a few ideas that are probably worth pursuing. What I originally was going with was a game focused on indirect control of a navigator that explores, but I ended up ditching that for something a little simpler.

Echolon plays a little like Asteroids where you’re exploring a really large room that that only gets illuminated when your bullets (made of light!) collide with walls. Shots have the ability to bounce off walls. There are enemy turrets scattered throughout the level that will shoot at you (natch). Destroy all the turrets to win!

Originally the game was going to be series of rooms and there was some vague idea of a limited upgrade system. Additionally I wanted other abilities and weapon types that would help illuminate the map in more meaningful ways. I didn’t have the time for that, but I sorta like the idea and may pursue that further.

Tools/engine used were Flixel, sfxr, Audacity, Photoshop, and FlashDevelop. I’ll have a timelapse video and a larger post-mortem up later.

Play the game here guys and gals. Thanks!

OK, so I submitted the game with 3 minutes to spare, and I’m no longer a Ludum Dare newbie. But why do i feel so… BLAH? I need to get away from the computer for a while, I think…

My game didn’t end up where I wanted it to, but that’s OK. I still managed to create a great foundation that I can continue to build upon. The game has serious potential, I think. It needs more refinement, content, and story, of course… but isn’t that the case with all games? I wanted to make at least ONE song for the game, but I just didn’t have enough time. I don’t even have any sound effects yet. I had music constantly playing during the development of Soulspark, so I never really noticed until I played my ‘final’ version. It’s terribly quiet, so please… if you play my game… put some music on.

Since the theme is all about EXPLORING, Soulspark is a laid-back, no-action kind of experience. No enemies and no weapons. Just you and the world. OH, and your constantly depleting battery power that you have to recharge. Think Wall-E meets Fallout… then throw it head first into Metroid… and suck out all of the action. Does it make a fun game? Maybe not at this point… but like I said… the potential is there.

Soulspark game page

So crunch time is OVER, which means it’s time to EAT!

The greatest food photos of Ludum Dare 16 AFTER THE BREAK:

GRILLED CHICKEN, BACON, AND ROASTED RED PEPPERS ON A RANCH DRESSING BASE

(click for ultimate taste-vision)

CHOCOLATEY RATMOUSE DELICIOUSNESS (click for ultimate taste-vision)

Tags: foodphoto food screenshot pizza chocolate

Wow.  So after 2 years of not using openGL…. I think I fail at this programming thing.  I guess I’ll leave the videogame programming to my talented husband (JonnyD)….  Can we have a team (real) LD sometime? Please? PLEASE?  Then maybe I could actually be part of one and feel accomplished .

Anyway, This is as far as I got…  There’s no game to this.  Just a scene with mis-aligned textures and crappy graphics (MS Paint style).  I’m glad I didn’t put much time into this.

You can see my entry here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=57

I’ll do an updated version later on this week, fix some things that need fixing and add a few features that are missing. Maybe I’ll build a fullscale (?) flash game based on this, and sell it for iPhone. Then move to bermuda.

POSTMORTEM – What went right:
– Rule system for the crew was/is awesome.
– Flixel is great! Perfect for a compo like this, although I didn’t use too much of it…
– I thought for awhile about the theme, and made a short design document with my ideas which was a great help.
– It’s like, -40’C in my city which is really, really cold and was helpful in finding inspiration for exploring the icy north.

What went wrong:
– As usual I didn’t give myself enough time to polish it up at the end. I spent some time on features that were cut or I didn’t finish, but it could have benefited a lot from just a bit more playing.
– Developing on Windows wasn’t quite what I am used to. But I got quite used to FlashDevelop. I’d like to move this over to Eclipse/Linux but figuring out how to build the AS3 stuff is just a bit tricky.

This was fun, thanks guys!

Are you familiar to the feeling when you’ve just submitted a game and then realize that there’s a random game-breaking bug in? Then you spend 2 hours fixing it while acknowledging that the deadline is coming nearer and nearer and you should already be asleep.

I had such case yesterday; I had just submitted my game, when I realized that the map system doesn’t somehow work in the compiled game, even though it runs fine in the editor. It was already 23:00, and I was about to have school the next day, but I anyway had to fix that thing. And sure it was difficult, because there was no logical reason for it to bug like that. Way to go, corrupted objects.

Anyway, amazing LD as usual, I really enjoyed creating my game and there are lots of amazing entries this time! I’ll post a video where I beat my own game, again, because I guess I made it once again too hard for others than me.

This effort was really an excuse to try out my new camera. Surprisingly, I think the images inspired me with ideas when often staring at an empty text editor doesn’t. It’s amazing what can be made out of ordinary objects using creativity. For instance, the splash screen was from the front of my garbage can. Also, composed images such as the menu screen I think came out really well and were quite fun to create.

This inspiration lead to what I would have to consider my most complete entry in any competition. The game has a splash screen, a working menu screen, a working game with both win and lose scenarios, sound effects (using SFXR) and even a few humorous voice effects. When the game is over, the game will successfully go back to the menu screen, and finally, there is actually a win screen. That is a lot to accomplish in 15-18 hours or so.

I think also a lot of my success was based on the tool I choose, BlitzMax. It really takes a lot of the labor out of game-making that you have to deal with if you use tools like SDL and C++. On top of Blitz, I chose a game framework from Ignition that makes it even easier to build retro-style games. Having not used BlitzMax in years (and never having used the Ignition framework before) did cause some problems though. I spent way too much time looking at example code and the documentation in both BlitzMax and the framework.

Overall, I am pretty happy with my entry, in terms of what I expected to produce and what I actually accomplished. I wanted to create a really simple game with using some photographic imagery, and I think I met my goal. It also helps that I have done several LDs before and so it seemed like I could gauge my progress and was able to make quick decisions/sacrifices to ensure that something playable would be completed in time. For example, putting in animations in the misfit toys or making them non-stationary would have been very cool, but I realized right away I wouldn’t have had anything finished in time if I set out to complete either of these goals. Having some experience helps you realize what you can and can’t do in the time period you have left. I was able to avoid dead-ends before they became gaping, black, time-sucking vortices.

I think overall though I had some success with BlitzMax, I probably won’t use it next time. There are a few annoyances with the language and IDE and  I have to believe there must be something better out there. So far the best I’ve found is XNA, but I’m still looking for that perfect and language and framework for my next game to push me to the next level.

I have to say that overal the game-making experience of this contest is so much fun. I didn’t really start until Sat, and I only worked about 8 or 9 hours a day, but it certainly does get a little crazy at the end there when some bug was preventing my game to work at all with just a couple hours left on the deadline.

Can’t wait for the next LD, and look forward to trying everyone’s entries!

I used my favorite language of all time, Ruby. With 1.9 Ruby has picked up speed and with Ocra you easily make a ~1-2 meg exe-file out of it. Also the excellent (and german precision engineered)  Gosu enables OpenGL accelerated 2D. On top of that I used my own Ruby/Gosu-specific framework Chingu to get game states, re-usable game logic and a boiler plate “game object”. To get a speedy get_pixel() I used the awesome Texplay by John Mair.

I have a pixel fetish. I love retro-looks in games, and I love pixel-perfect-collisions, a fetish that probably came into existence playing hours and hours of Lemmings 2-player mode on the classic Amiga 500.

So, the most time was spent up building a good pixel-perfect-collision algo, and it came out very playable, but not perfect. I ranted about it in my last blogpost.

With Ruby and Chingu my level-building got very clean, I think even ppl not into Ruby could understand what’s happening here:

class Level7 < Level
   def setup
     self.background = "level7.bmp"
     every(1000) { Enemy.create(:image => "acid_drop.bmp", x => 150, :velocity_y => 5) }
 every(1500) { Enemy.create(:image => "acid_drop.bmp", x => 250, :velocity_y => 5) }
   end
 end

or here (this is from the mainloop):

player.each_collision(Enemy) do |player, enemy|
 unless player.paused?
 player.pause!
 Sound["die.wav"].play(0.3)
 after(1000) {  player.x = @entry_x; player.y = @entry_y; player.unpause!; }
 end
 end

It’s nice when it’s silly simple building readable levels.

I also got a very basic and simple Map-class going so I could build on my matrix of screens that made up the game:

map = [
 [LevelUp, nil, nil, nil],
 [Level1, Level2,Level22, nil],
 [LevelAir, nil, Level3, nil],
 [LevelAir2, Level5, Level4, nil],
 [nil, Level6, Level7, nil],
 [nil, Level8, Level9, End],
 ]

Basically if you exited a screen to the right I would increment a column_counter and fetch a new screen from the matrix. If exiting downwards, increment row_counter an fetch a new screen.

If you like OO, short readable code and scripting languages in general and haven’t checked out Ruby or Gosu yet, now is the time to do it.

The Good
– This is the first time I’ve been using OpenGL and SDL for something that is more than just a techdemo and I have to say the transition from plain SDL to SDL + OpenGL went quite smoothly
– The core gameplay elements made it into the game
– This is the first time I’ve been using Lua for scripting in a game. I wanted to use Lua more extensively, but it’s just a small part now, still I’m quite pleased with that element and how that went without any problems along the way
– Graphics and music are mostly how I imagined it, I also made some sounds with SFXR, but those didn’t make in the final game
– Basic AI: That’s really awesome, it was implemented like 30 minutes before deadline and it’s great that it works

The Bad
– I almost slept 24 hours of the time (my alarm was not working) and was too tired from staying up so late to get up early
– There was generelly a lack of time, for example, there were some things to be done for college and I discovered Mass Effect, which was a really bad idea to double-click the Mass Effect icon, it was time-consuming and took a lot of will power to exit the game and get back to coding
– I almost went with Unity instead of my own framework and the decision took a few hours
– There were some issues with my camera, that’s why there aren’t any deskphotos or foodphotos from me
– Since I’ve been using SDL + OpenGL for the first time for a real game that has actually been finished, some parts of my framework are still in its infancy (espacially the texture loader routines), that’s why there are some problems with washed-out textures and memory leaks

I’ve uploaded the linux port and there’s now a gameplay video on youtube. The timelapse video is coming, don’t worry.

Now I’m looking forward to try everyone’s entries.

Tags: post-mortem

I decided to use a weird tool for ludum dare this time: Mathematica. I wanted to try to a game that used dynamically generated sounds because usually I never do anything with sound. Mathematica is definitely a little weird for building an interactive application, but it gave me easy sound generation, and 3D rendering in a nice interactive development environment. It was almost kind of Lisp-y. I did find a fantastic reference for how to do interactive game programming in Mathematica taught at Rice University with a lot of examples here. Here’s an example of what playing with sounds looks like in Mathematica.

I thought I might try to do my entry Dark Maze using sound exclusively (requires free Mathematica 7 Player to play). I wasn’t the only one with the sound exclusive idea. The entry Soundscape goes in a similar direction. I ended up having some visual elements for the game. For instance, you can see yourself and the balls you throw by default, and you can also “cheat” to see the whole environment, at which point the exercise of navigating becomes trivial. I’d still like to see if it’s possible to do an audio-only form of maze navigation. Perhaps if the audio simulation were good enough to capture things like echos, or maybe it would just have to do something very artificial like different tones for different things.

I’ve included my timelapse as an embedded thing, but it’ll take a little while for the admins to make it work. Until then, here’s a link to it.

Hi all, I got some problem updating the [broken] link to my entry, so updated the file position on my server.

Also I cannot write commment on my entry, nor modify what i wrote when i entered. Hoping that it’s only my problem can i ask how do you update you entry?

The download link is, for all operating system:

http://donotjava.netsons.org/download/ludumdare/LD16.zip

On windows you will need cygwin [linux emulator] or something similar [like vmware or other emulator].

Many thanks to pythong that reported the problem.

Waiting for a fix [for my broken brain probably 8) ]:

GOOD VOTING AND TESTING TIME TO ALL!

Ok, i’m an idiot or maybe i got some big brain damage this week 8) Found the “edit my entry” link and all is fine now.

I just woke up and was able to play through my game. Here are a few things which went wrong:

• I spent too much time on enemy variants. I should have gone for more variants of the terrain tiles instead, to make the exploration more fun. Terrain tiles are faster to draw since they don’t rotate. A snow area and desert area could have been cool.
• The title/splash screen has a very flat landscape. I didn’t add any shadows or foggy background mountains.
• I could have avoided combat altogether and focused on stealth exploration, sneaking by and grabbing the loot. It’s difficult to do a satisfying combat system in just a few hours. I had no time to make fun AI either.
• The game gets too easy mid-end. I didn’t have time to play through it even once. Anyways, this means that it’s mostly laborsome to find the last treasures.
• I should have made a few sounds. Without sound, one feels detached from the game. It’s harder to understand what is going on (especially taking hits in combat). Music adds atmosphere too, of course. I had an idea where the tile map drawing routine would generate ambient sounds.
• I flipped two of the squid frames wrong. I didn’t notice because I had put most of them in a maze with high walls.
• The main character looks like it is ice skating because of the scroll focus, but drawing 2 walk frames * 4 angles * 2 stances would have been too much work for me. I suppose it would’ve been less of a problem in a game where you move less.
• Speaking of which, tapping the movement buttons is straining on the hand after a while.
• Str(ength) should have been Att(ack) in the sidebar. I was thinking of drawing a background for the sidebar, but had no time left. The treasure were supposed to do things, but I didn’t have time for that either.
• If Health = 0 Then FGameOver() … I guess this made sense at some point, but it doesn’t in the current version. I’m generally careful and put less than checks in because I know I might change stuff around or lose control of value ranges.
• It would’ve been simple to couple the stats-up mechanic with the player’s current def/att mode, giving the player a bit of a choice for stats development.

I can’t leave comments to my entry.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1447

Can please some one leave a following comment:

If you get this

“ODE Internal Error
Stepsize must be > 0″

Change system decimal separator to “,”

Sorry, it is little my fault (