I’ve added projectile culling, and projectiles also die when they hit things.

I’ve put that into a demo, which you can grab here.

Cherry now has combat! Yeah! Baddies will die if you kill them. You’ll die, though, if they kill you. As you kill them, more will spawn.

Here’s a screenie:

You can finally kill stuff!

Anyone who would like the .love file (Which requires that you have Love2D installed) can find it here, and those who would like the Windows version (Which includes the Windows version of Love2D) can find that here.

Note that Windows users should drag “Cherry-0.1.0.love” onto “love.exe” to run it. Just thought I’d mention that!

Controls are:
Arrows: Move
Z: Fire Gun
X: Fire Missile
A: Use Brakes
S: Use Turbo

I’ve decided to stop cluttering up this blog with updates on my work, so I’ve set up my own blog on Blogspot.

Just thought anyone who was following Cherry should know.

Myself and Nora Shishi are gonna do our MiniLD19 projects at my flat in East London, if there’s anyone semi-local that’d like to join in, it might be a little more social and fun / less lonely and cabin-fevery! Let me know if you’re interested. (Spare table, wifi etc).

Taking SpaceManiac’s suggestion to finish up and not wanting to let snowyowl’s good sprites go to waste, here’s Alien Cow Snatch (made for MinLD #18) at last!

Snatch that cow now!

Controls

Left – Left Arrow

Right – Right Arrow

Jump – Up Arrow

Technical Details

C++, SFML, Box2d, Ticpp, Awesomium

The Story

You are an alien whose ship has been crashed  by green cows, and you were badly injured. Now you are out to get all the cows in the universe!

How the War Began

Download Alien Cow Snatch

Limitations

Only 1 level

Cool Stuff

Changes to the map while the app runs is almost immediately updated in game.

The cool background is loaded via the web.

Ok, so ludumdare 17 was forever ago, whatever.

Ages ago I started a postcompo version of my game but then became busy and put it off and forgot about it. I’ve just picked it up again and done some work on it such that I am happy enough with it.

As well as a bunch of bugfixes and minor tweaks, changes include:

Healing over time when near a friendly building. Visual improvements and shore rendering. Improved mapmaker  ensures that players are a minimum distance apart, and that no cities are stuck inland. Victory / Defeat messages. Fire varying in size according to how much damage the unit has taken and the size of the unit.

So no, nothing super different, but enough to make it better.

It looks like this

Download it: (Windows, 1.8MB)

My entry into LD17 got tarted up, fixed a bit, had sounds added, was lengthened a tad, is more girthy, and has just come out on the Xbox 360. It’s in the Indie Games section now so thought I’d pass on the information. There’s an 8 minute free demo, so all those who couldn’t play my entry because it was XNA can now not play my entry because it’s on Xbox!

Instructions on how to find the demo on a 360 here.

Some screenshots and a slightly wry (sly?) video that deliberately tries to misinform the viewer about the game here.

It costs less than a dollar to buy.

Tags: LD17, XBLIG, xna

The theme for Mini LD #19 is Industry.

You can pick your 48h slot starting anytime from now to 12h from now (or something like that — 48h anytime this weekend is the idea).

After the weekend is over, there will be one week of voting, where there will just be two categories, Gameplay (meaning innovation, fun etc of the game idea/mechanic) and Presentation (meaning quality graphics, sounds, UI polish etc).

When you are done, and if you want to be in the voting (and you feel it would be fair), submit your entry using this form. If you still have done something but are not up for the voting, please post a regular post with what you’ve done.

The rules are available in an earlier post, but in short it’s very much like a regular LD 48h.

Good luck and have fun!

Update, June 14: Submissions will probably be closed and voting begin sometime during Monday evening, European time.

Update 2, June 14: Voting is now open.

Industry sim.

You have a small house, we can call it a factory. You need to eat. Somewhere to sleep.

Clothes.

You find an order of 1000 nailes. You have taken a loan of $500 from the bank with 8%

interest. You need to buy: Material (Iron), Tools (Hammer, Anvil, Tongs), Fireplace &

Energy (coal). You hire a worker (An old chap). Tell the worker to make nailes. It goes

slow, but steady forward.

I can simplify it a bit: You need, energy, material & labour.

I plan to:

• Use a robot as a protagonist in a way that is meaningful (IE: Not just a humanoid robot, but something like a tank or a spider-thang)
• Make a shooter with funky weapons of some sort
• Use Lua and Love2D
• Use an unusual setting via unusual level design

The rest depends on the theme.

I will be beginning at 23:00 GMT.

My concept is that of a shoot-em-up with short, procedural levels. The concept obeys the theme by making the levels in a factory, albeit one in the code.

The player will take the form of one of a handful of robots that each move in different ways, and the baddies will also take a handful of different forms.

The game will use Gameboy-style pixel art.

There is no story. I can’t think of one.

Here’s hoping…

I didn’t know there was a Ludum Dare this weekend! Hopefully I’ll get something done. I plan to:

• Work in Flixel
• Make a game about some industrial manufacturing plant- perhaps a factory or oil-refining plant
• Graphics in Paint.net
• Have an interesting graphic style, perhaps black and white with color highlights.
• Have simple game mechanics
• Actually finish and submit within the time limit
• Not have the game be completely hated by the masses

I think I’ll warm up with some graphics. I’m a little rusty.

Wish me luck!

-Ashkin

So scratch all of that, my video card is acting up (the one I just bought a week ago…) so I’m writing up a quick sprite engine and am now making some kind of “factory defense” game. I think I’m going to go with some kind of shooter where the goal is to leave as much infrastructure as possible intact, and the more you leave behind the better your upgrades get (as your side of the battle has more resources than if you had just blown it all up).

I intend to participate in this mini, and even though I’m hosting it it seems pretty fair, because I don’t actually know what I’m going to do yet. But I have several ideas…

• A transportation game, sort of like Transport Tycoon. Little innovation value, but probably fun to program and play.
• Sort of a reverse version of the above, where you instead of handling transportation and trying to make a profit from that, you are the customer of transportation. Either as a government kind of thing, or just a company with stores and factories. A little more innovative perhaps, but I’m not sure how it should play yet.
• A factory/conveyor puzzle game, where you build or process some kind of product. Inspired by Manufactoria, among other things. Also not very innovative, but a good thing with puzzle games is you can make lots of levels for them, if the elements are good enough, and they tend to be fun.
• Some sort of industrialization sim, where at a start there’s just a bunch of low tech farms, and then innovations makes things more effective, there becomes a surplus population, cities are formed, new industries are formed, and so on. Think it would be really interesting, but probably too large for an LD.

So just have to figure out which to do… so far I’ve just got my base code up and running.

Tags: factory, ideas, journal, log, puzzle, transportation

I was going to skip this mini-LD, I really was. But I ran into an impossible bug on my current project sooo…

I’m going to build some type of multiplayer industrial simulation. From scratch except:

– I’ll use the playerio multiplayer API

Basically I’m hoping that by being forced to quickly do a message handler from scratch, I’ll either not cause my bug (in which case I can compare the MLD game code to my main project code and fix it) or I’ll manifest the bug with more understandable symptoms because the message handler will be simpler (and then be able to compare to the project code and fix it).

(If the consensus is that this in unallowable middleware, I won’t enter the game for voting. It meets the criteria of LD16 for inclusion though (free, no NDA, I’m allowed to release my source, etc))

Regardless, watch this space for news on the development of Power Plant Operator vs Ninja! (Actually, I probably won’t do very many blog updates this time, since there’s quite a bit of work to do…)

My start time is 7:00PM Fri, AKDT (UTC -8). Current time is 9PM… Current status… the design document is done ‘enough’.

well thats a good one…. maby i should make a game where you build a house with a small amount a money 😀
im gonna do this though (hopefuly)

im alsp starting at 7:30 am on saterday

good luck to all

Tags: ...

I’ve finally done something that’s visible, the land type map generation, though it doesn’t look much like a map yet, it will need cities and roads and stuff as well.

Other than that, I’ve just written down kinds of resources, factories, trucks etc, and their costs.

Tags: journal, procedural generation, screenshot

This is my first time participating!

See the world of Industry close up from the eyes of an eight-year-old sweatshop worker.

Keep your supervisor impressed by w0rking hard and rest while he’s away to gain stamina.

its one hour in and its accually looking good!
i spent a little time trying to get the building to rise and what not 😀
ya i might not have that much time to code TODAY but tomarow might be another story 😀

Tags: one hour in and its good yay

I’ve settled for an idea, it’s a trading game à la Port Royale, but where you have a trucker company. You can own one or more trucks (of different power) and you buy and sell goods at factories and stores etc. Trick will of course be buy low sell high.

I intend to set the game over a square of 300 km, though I don’t know if it will be to scale much and there’s the intention of having a large amount of different resource. Regarding how it will look, there will just be a map view really, so nothing very fancy. Not sure if it will be random or hand made yet.

Tags: journal, trade, transportation, trucks

screen shot of it so far

its all alfa sprites so far but the blue thing it the building the guy is the worker and money if well….. money also the circle makes the player 😀

Tags: modivation NOt

I’m using a dot matrix display for Gunner Robo Pocket

My images will be text files, where each character is a pixel. A “.” is a “white” pixel, a “#” is a “black” pixel, and anything else is not part of the image. By “white” I mean the background color, and by “black” I mean the color of an activated pixel.

Things are coming along fairly nicely, and I’m happy with my progress. Now, I need some images to test my dot matrix display with…

I’ve got a good feeling about this one… (Not that that’s stopped failure in the past…)

—Mr.Dude

Inspired by Chinese knock off toys I’ve decided to make a knock-off toy factory puzzle game. Here’s some of the assets so far:

It’ll probably be a fairly basic standard gem-drop type puzzle game, but I’m racking my brains for play ideas to make it more interesting right now.

Good morning people! It’s 11.30 here, and i just decided to give this a try.

While everyone around me is watching the football game (Argentina vs. Nigeria) I will try to focus on… Industry!

Mmm, my father here says I should do something with an “assembly line”, because that is the base in the moder industrial world. But maybe I will do something more simple. Something i could code and draw fast.

My game for MiniLD #19 is like this now.

The purpose is to kill other 3 players like Bomberman.

I now have cities and roads, albeit the roads are not very natural. They feel sort of alien. Also, the cities doesn’t have names or populations yet.

Too be honest, I could probably spend the rest of the weekend on making the roads good, so I will probably try to get on with the rest of the game stuff instead, since the game doesn’t actually need perfect roads. Just roads.

Next I should get some factories and stuff out there.

Tags: journal, procedural generation, roads, screenshot

For some reason, PXTone took all of the voices for a song I’m writing for my game, and changed them to a snare drum. As a result, it changes a groovy tune to a steaming pile of shi- erm, bad things. Best of all, is when I change the voice, it changes it right back to a snare drum! All of my other songs are thankfully unaltered, but still. This is just silly.

Either way, screenshot time.

Scaffolds!

yup its caled build…. im not good with names so i caled it build.
screen shot

this is ganna be good

Tags: no tags fo u

… managed to get my lobby working, and synced two clients. (The price and demand are changing in real time, though you wouldn’t know from the screenshot.)

Next up… a building selector, placement of buildings, switching between players’ power plants, a thermodynamics model (!), and sabotage. Also sprites, sounds and music. And a context sensitive menu. And help popups. And an AI that can play the game.

Yeah. The likelyhood that I’ll finish this is pretty low. But I’ll keep working and get as far as I can. Hopefully I’ll be able to duplicate the bug I’m looking for.

I alredy have an idea of how the game will be like when finished. I started to make the graphics, the code will be simplier (I hope). This is my image reference for the game:

Yes, assembli line. And yes, pixel art 😛

It will be more a Pretentious Art Game than other thing, maybe. Hehe, we’ll see.

completely forgot about this, looks like I’ve got a a late start. I’ve got a few ideas, i’m gunna go for something fast paced and intense. Great Theme btw. I’ll post some content once there is some

EDIT: got me some concept

Beautiful in its simplicity!

After the hell that Lua has put me through today, I’ve decided that I absolutely hate it. I’m going to be porting what I have of Gunner Robo Pocket to Python/Pygame. I will need someone to do a py2exe port, but I really think that I’d be better off doing that than torturing myself with Lua any longer.

That said, there is next to zero chance that I will finish on time now. Because of that, I am tentatively giving up this Mini-LD, or at least asking that the expectations be lowered.

That said, I’ll be posting about further updates here until the Mini-LD is over, then on my blog. (Which is syndicated on /planet)

— Mr.Dude

well its 3:45 where i am so ya…..
screen shot

you might notise i have snipers and enemys now 😀
also the angry guy at the right… i know hes weird but hey i like him:d aneyways he is the boss of the componey and he hates wasted time so you have to build the hotel before he fires you 😀
the hotel in the snapshot is halfe way done with building….

-pants12

Tags: why should you hav tag

18 hours in, and all I have to show for it are some icons (and a design document, not pictured):

Fortunately, this covers most of the graphics in my game, so now it’s time to dive into actual development. I’m planning an economic simulator, and these are the different resource types that you have to deal with.

My deadline is 21:00 PST tomorrow.

Tags: journal

ya i gonna eat dinner and i gonna add a tutorial for new players 😀

i saw some other screenshots of games and i am impressed! well good luck to all still in the comp

-pants12

Tags: poo

||||||||||
im done with all the code and now im just gonna make the sprites good! im so happy i finished with code :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

so ya ill see you when im done spriting

-pants12

Tags: code, no tag fo u, poo

Hullo,

First time trying this Ludum Dare thing.

Haven’t really had time to give it a proper go (thanks to the kids) but I figured I should try and do something anyway… posting what I’ve managed so far –  hopefully get some time to polish a bit tomorrow.

“Industry” to me says “crates” – since every FPS loves them, but noone ever ever ever has a pallet lying around to shift them. Thus, to prove how damned essential those things are – a fork lift truck simulator.

Windows/Mac users can play it here: http://www.roguishness.com/grumpyferret/forklift/

Requires Unity3D plugin (sorry linux folks, but don’t worry you’re not really missing much here ;))

Credit where credit’s due all the clever stuff is down to Unity 😉 (3d rendering, rigidbody physics, wheel physics etc.)

(and I’d probably never have thought about pallet’s were it not for oldmanmurray)

Cheers,
Flim

Oh god I’m so far behind

hey its pants12 proudly announces build!
there is a tut in the game so i wont say much 😉
link is http://www.yoyogames.com/games/131638/download
have fun
screen shot:

Tags: build, done, pants one two, pants12, rofl

this is my first time entering and i dont know if this is the right spot to enter but ive spent a good hour looking for an entry form.

now its my understanding that you pick a 48hour slot and declare it then work.Well i pick from the moment i post this to 48 hours later.

is it okay to use unity this its the only game development tool i have working as my main pc decided it was going to die last week.

if ive entered wrong please tell me.

thankyou

This is how my game looks right now. The name of the game will be “J.O.Y. Industries” 😛

Im going to sleep now… good luck! =D

Well, I’m finished anyway 😉 it’s pretty far from greatness, but it now has some terrible textures (hand scribbled) to match the gameplay.

Link to play: http://www.roguishness.com/grumpyferret/forklift/

after popping twice my normal  dose of Ritalin this mourning and being quite twitchy throughout the day Ive done next to no programing and a crap ton of art so here’s the art

note: the super awesome animation the first ive ever done

im gonna put done the wacom now and get to codeing

I saw “industry” and thought “baby factory”. So… yeah…

I drank a crapload of tea this morning, and am quite excitable right now. I’ve been working on some sprites, but it’s only about 10:00 AM here in Mittenland.

As I’ve said before (quite a few times), Gunner Robo Pocket is now a personal project of mine. I will hopefully, again, have something done by Monday afternoon.

Wow… I just can’t seem to get a game done in an LD… Hm…

Ah well, at least I’ve got a fun idea out of this one.

— Mr. Dude

Go check out all of the finished games here.

I think you’ll have fun playing Scaffolds if you like puzzles that tax the brain heavily. 😉

Here we are! My game was started on Saturday at more or less 10:00 and finished right now on Sunday at 23:00.

It’s a play by email game, so you don’t have to download any executable, just send and receive emails 8)

You can get the help in html format in your email inbox just by sending an email with “help” as the body to industrymld19@lavabit.com
The help can also be find in the game list area here : gamepage .

I actually managed to finish, though I doubted it quite a few times in the last seven hours. There’s almost no end to the list on how many things were cut and it’s unpolished to no end. But still, you can sort of play it and enjoy it.

You can view the submitted entry here.

Also, here’s a new screenshot (included with the entry), showing truck editing.

Looking forward to test all the other games.

Tags: D, final, GLFW, industry, journal, opengl, procedural generation, screenshot, transportation, trucks

Super Knock-Off Factory is done!

I’m so happy!

This was much harder than I anticipated, so I’m glad I got my head around the game logic in the end. It was also depressingly not fun until I reworked it a little right at the end.

Well, hope you like it anyway.

edit: Tweaked the randomiser very slightly, to force it to give you feet when the tubes are empty (so you always start with something you can drop).

I spent most of yesterday in bed with a splitting headache so that was basically 24+ hours spent out of commission. Mostly finished up the sprite handler classes and put together a quick demo where you can’t do anything. Here’s a brief video of what I got done.

And a screenshot:

What you can’t see:

• Sprites are all handled with a very robust class which handles loading, animation, etc. hands-free
• The sprite manager class wasn’t finished so there was some handcoding to be done for displaying the map, but for the most part the main code is very stripped down and the eventual goal is to just get it down to a spriteManager.render() call in the main loop.
• Another very robust path handling class which supports linear, circular/spiral, and bezier curve types. The plane in the video is following randomly derived quartic bezier curves spliced end to end (hence the sudden change in direction sometimes).
• The map itself is a bunch of layered sprites with transparency where appropriate (although see below)

This is also my first attempt at using Inkscape to make art assets (besides some rudimentary textures used in TubeRacer). With grid snapping it’s pretty easy to make some basic sprites, although edge aliasing was an issue (which I think can be fixed with using 32-bit PNGs and converting those to 32-bit BMP for use with the engine, and/or just adding PNG support to the engine, which I would’ve done if not for the time restriction). With 32-bit image support the engine could also handle things like transparent smoke coming from the factories and not having to worry about aliasing on the edges of sprites (like the plane, where it’s very obvious). Inkscape still has some issues with grid snapping though which made doing some things a pain (like the smokestacks).

All in all if I hadn’t come down with whatever illness hit me on Saturday I would’ve got a lot more done. I’m going to give it another 24 hours of work just to see what I could’ve finished but I won’t be entering.

Finished!

Last 2 hours or so I was trying to change the icon of the game. Finally did it.

Maybe I will add or change somethings latter but, as it is, the game can be considered “finished” =)

Here is te link.

I’ll see what I have to do now to submit.

Mini LD #19 is now over and submissions are closed (if someone was left out, please make yourself heard). Does that mean it’s now entirely over? Of course not.

Voting is now open. It’ll run for a week and differs a bit from regular LDs in that there’s just two categories: Gameplay and Presentation. I believe it should be straightforward, but here’s some help if it’s unclear what they mean:

Gameplay focuses on the actual game and game idea, its innovation, how well it plays etc. Fun belongs too a large part to it.

Presentation is more to do with the package the game comes in: graphics and sounds, user interfaces, polish and humor, and things like that. Fun can of course be affected by this.

As usual, only people who submitted an entry can vote, but anyone can of course check the games out. I think it’s been a great mini so far, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it and like the entries. See you with the results in a week.

Update, June 21: Voting is over and the results are in.

Tags: voting

Hi all, i’ve to apologize but tonight i’ve seen that some player sent some email to get a game help, a report and create a new account. The game run a turn each day at 4:00, so i’ve to start another program to replay to HELP and REPORT command every 5 minutes. The problem is that … i’ve lost your registration email so you have to resend it. Sorry, my bad! [you should receive HELP and REPORT if your command was that one]

Now the game replay each HELP and REPORT mail in 5 minutes and make a game turn each night at 4:00.

Hope someone will subscribe this game cause that’s not so fun to play alone 8p

c-ya

H!B!F!S! wasn’t packaged correctly for computers without XNA. My bad.

The problem should be resolved now.

After the loading screen I get “Unexpected error while loading the game>”

maby your computer cant take it….

Jesus christ, what country do you live in?! I’ve never seen a construction crew with SNIPERS before =P

i live in america :d and the snipers are an inside joke 😀

Very, very simple. Just spawn a few snipers and workers, and spam the worker button until you win.

i know

I know you finished early, so it would have been nice to rework some of the art, or flesh out the gameplay a little. Shows the foundation of a good game tho – interesting concept.

thanks ill thank about working on it some more but thats for a different time.

Also, there a TON of really trivial spelling errors. It looks very amateurish. If English isn’t your native language, don’t worry too much about it – just have a native speaker go over it first.

im a fast typer and i hate spelling so ill work on that though 😉

Snipers truly are common problem at constructions sites these days, a big problem. Perhaps not an extremely great game, but it was amusing with its humor. “everything else by … pants12” I never would have guessed!

yes snipers are big problems 😉
thanks 😀

It’s lovely… like… in a naive way =) (L)
:O Those red guys were really angry, I bet they have a small otel and didnt wanted compentence.

lol your right

Tags: no

Last April I entered a game into Ludum Dare for the first time. After some redesigning I started from scratch and fixed a lot of problems with it (although I still have a lot more work to do).  Although it no longer has anything to do with the LD#17 theme of  “Islands” anymore, I’m happy to say that it’s still fun (and even more so than before). I don’t have a version to release yet but I’ll be documenting my progress on my new blog, twentyonepixel, so head over and check it out!

Yep, the real deal is coming up August 20th-22nd weekend. Suggest themes here. There will be some big changes as discussed here. We’ll be working on these changes and drafting up the new rules and specifics starting late July, so stay tuned. See you then!

Having converted my PC XNA LD17 game to the Xbox 360 via XBLIG, I next used it as a learning experience for Flash. With flixel I’ve now got a browser version (with some improvements to the game, such as medals) so everyone who wanted to judge it during LD17 but couldn’t can now see how little they missed out!

Play it here! Please!

I’m going to be working through Ian Schrieber’s online Game Design course over the next few months.  If anyone here is interested in going through it with me, please come visit my game design blog

Tags: Shameless Plug

I’m in for Mini-LD #20.

I’ll be using Python/Pygame, first of all. I plan to do at least 1 unfamiliar thing this weekend, but I haven’t decided what that will be.

My current thought is to make a game in a genre I haven’t used for a (completed) game before. I’ve also though about using techniques that I haven’t used before.

My strategy this time is to try to keep the thing playable as much as possible. Roll out an initial demo as quickly as possible and work to a playable version as quickly as possible when new features are implemented. That will hopefully keep me from stalling like I usually do.

I’m really eager for this. I’ve been chipping away at several large projects, and a small game should be a nice break from that.

I’m ready, and just as optimistic as I tend to be. I’m hoping this one works out okay…

— Mr. Dude

It’s been a while since I’ve entered a competetion, I plan to join in but,  I’m not used to the new site & system.  So do I just make blog posts to the topic or is there other submission & registration methods used in the competition?

I’m planning on Participating as well.  I think it’s going to be XNA again… Unless I decide to go totally crazy and play with C++ again.

When is the miniLD20 gonna start??!?!?

Things are coming along quite well. I started from PURE scratch. Meaning: I began with a blank text file. And started typing.

I’ve been using Keeyai’s Chronolapse to take time-lapse screenshots.

I’ve decided to write the game in pure HTML5 – that’s right, folks, no 3d engines or anything. But heck, the game will work on all platforms, in all OSes and on handhelds like iPhone, iPad, Wii and PS3, etc.

So far, I have timers, a debug log display, a splash screen, buttons, keypress events, and multi-layered parallax scrolling.

How are YOU coming along? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Post something and make sure checkmark the tag “MiniLD #20″ from the catagories tab to the right of your new post box.

This is fun! Time for a break.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 10:36 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I finally decided that I’m going to give it my all. Might be going somewhere tomorrow, so my time might be a little limited, but I’m pretty sure I have an idea and will be able to complete a prototypeish version of it.

I’ve decided on a resource-gathering game, where the goal is to gather the most material within a time limit. During this time period you must place collectors, manually collect, and cut off your enemy’s collectors from material supplies. Pretty simple, but the levels are looking varied enough that it should turn out to be pretty fun to play with a friend. (Probably not going to code AI.)

The levels are procedurally generated (ooh, buzzword) and so will be the collection units’ graphics. Also, I hope to make a special vector font system that offsets all line segment points to create a font that never uses the same glyph twice–every character having unique offsets within it. If you didn’t notice at the beginning of this paragraph, you can see my level generator in action here.

Can’t wait until tomorrow! I think I’ll be able to finish this project.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 11:29 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi guys! I just registered! How can I participate???

I plan to join miniLD #20, which will be my first time competing.
This should be interesting

There seems to have been a Dwarf Fortress frenzy in the channel these past few days (which of course pushed me to fall in the DF trap once again. Already 2 all nighters lost to it…) and necessarily I wondered about some of the technical aspects. And of course I started coding.

After a few hours, there I am, with an OpenGL powered virtual terminal, that displays a 256 glyphs bitmap font, has 16 colors, has background and glyph coloring, and is actually just a network terminal.

Yeah. The only thing it can do is connect to a server, get text and color information from it, and send keypresses.

It’s kinda like OnLive, but for 8bit text 2*4bits indexed color games. Awesome. In fact the original idea was that since keypresses and a few letters are quite light with modern connections, why bother duplicating the game world in each player’s client? It brings lots of annoying things like synchronisation, world updates, distributed computing, cheating, etc.

My legendary laziness suggested that any game could in fact regroup world data, game logic, input and output in a single place. Exactly like a local multiplayer game. But over a network. It gives interesting ideas like very cheap “observer” mode (just broadcast some player’s screen to anyone who wants), transparent join/leave (after a deconnection or a local crash, find the game as it was, assuming the server paused, or rejoin a persistent multi experience), etc.

Now a cool thing would be to apply that for this MiniLD. I’m still not sure I’ll have time to enter, but who knows. It will depend on the theme I guess.

EDIT: oh and needless to say, there is some Lua involved. The main app with the OpenGL drawing is in C, but the config and the network code is Lua. Manipulating text and sockets is much easier there.

And about the protocol, it couldn’t be simpler: client->server is “SDL_Key code (as decimal text) and newline”, server->client is “char, 4bit background color, 4bit glyph color” for all cells, topleft to bottomright, followed by a newline.

The client also sends “tsize w h” to announce its size to the server at connection. That’s about all control messages I’ll use.

So the theme is greed. What a strange topic…
I honestly don’t know what game I should make. It will probably involve stealing items or cash from something. The weird thing about this competition is that every item must be unique.
This will be a challenge. (Especially since this is my first competition)
Oh, and the fact I know little about the game library I’m using.

This game will be coded in Python with pyglet. (Yayz!)
For those who are interested, I’m making this on Fedora 13. (which in fact I just installed today)

I need something to distract me. I will do this. I will try hard!

I hope flash is okay, even though so many people will feel like its not quite as programtastic.

So you’re an evil alien race who wants to conquer Earth. You have a spaceship that shoots freaking lazer beams. In the levels your goal is to kill all of the population in the city. Once you kill all the citizens and enemies you win that level. Now eventually you encounter tanks that fire bullets at you and move around. After a few more levels you encounter flying robots invented by human engineers. They give off streaks of energy that can hurt your health a lot.

I call this game Conquer The Planet. Now “all I need to do” is code and make graphics for it.

Here are some of my graphics:

I wonder what the game will be about?
Ok, so I’m no good with themes like “greed” so I went for the alt theme. I’ll try to shovel in some greed there but I’m still trying to figure out how.
Oh, and I still haven’t thought of the game mechanics themselves despite already starting to write code (I would post a screen if it wasn’t a black screen with a tini fish in the middle of it).
so… yeah…

Well, I picked up SDL only a couple of days ago, so at best something uber-simplistic can be expected from me.

Right now I am thinking of a game about a gang of -duh- gangsters each of whom has a choice: work for the common goal – getting a fat prize or reducing number of people it is going to be shared with…

I thought I’d try this MiniLD for a change but I’m not sure what to do with the special rule. It sounds interesting at first but it can also be very annoying.

Let’s see how one could get around it:

• Make crap or minimalistic graphics. Unfortunately it’s the most obvious choice. It’s easy to get lots of different objects if you don’t spend more than a few minutes on each one.
• Procedural generation. Each snowflake may be unique, but really they all look the same. I don’t like games that rely on generated content too much. It’s the human touch that makes things interesting, the procedurally generated stuff is just more of the same.
• Avoid the problem entirely, choose a game genre that doesn’t rely on repetition of content. Adventure games or visual novels don’t have a lot of use for multiple copies of the same object. That’s also why they are heavily dependent on content and really hard to complete in a week-end.
• Find an awesome gameplay idea. One that will satisfy the constraint and fit with the theme and be an original never played before gameplay.

So, since the last option isn’t going to happen just because I want it to. I’m left with some unsatisfactory choices…

I’m in. Not sure what to do with the theme/rule/alt-theme.

But We’ll See.(TM)

Grieve

Correction:

I’m in once I get an operating system installed 😀

This is my first LD entry ever, and I have no artistic talent, but! I made a game.

So there you were, happily fishing at your favorite pond, when the game warden showed up and was all, hey man you can’t fish here, this isn’t a fishing pond.

So you went home, angry. And you thought about it. And you drank a bit. And you thought some more, and you drank some more. And you decided that if you can’t have those fish, no one can. So you grabbed your shotgun, and … well.

Someone must have seen you on your way to the pond, the cops will be here any minute. But they won’t be able to catch an experienced woodsman like you. So just see how big of a fine you can rack up before they get there and you have to bolt.

Greed Fishing

Built on XNA 3.1/ .Net 3.5:

.Net 3.5 Runtime

XNA 3.1 Redistributable

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under MiniLD #20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Over 7 straight hours of work and I’m still not tired…
I figured I could have some greedy animal trying to catch as many different fish as possible, so that’s what i’m trying to make.

Tags: MiniLD 20 preview

I have to admit, I’m stumped.

Using the theme, rule, and alt-theme, the only game that comes to mind is trying to catch as many different fish as possible.

Taking out the alt-theme (It’s optional!), my pool of ideas doesn’t widen significantly.

Because every entity and terrain piece would have to be unique, I’d need loads of artwork to do something satisfactory, as well as some code that I wouldn’t be happy with.

I may be withdrawing from this one right at the start. I really don’t like the theme, and I really hate the alt-rule. Sorry folks, but I’m wanting to sit this one out. We’ll see how I feel after breakfast.

Ugh….

This limitation makes no sense.

One of every object?!

So my idea for a platformer will have to go -_-“

The block graphic generator seems to work fine, seems to become a gradius style treasure hunt.

Are we allowed loading files externally?

Like if I don’t wnt to store backgrounds inside the GMK itself, but rather in a seperate folder that it takes them from?

I’ve decided on what I’d like to do.

I will make a game within the time limit, but I will not be submitting it as it will not use the theme, rule, or alt-theme. I’m not a fan of the theme as such, I don’t like the rule, and I’m not fond of the alt-theme. Complain.

Instead, I will be making a game of my choosing within the time limit.

I haven’t decided what it will be yet, but I’m leaning toward a platformer. A short platformer. We shall see.

— Mr. Dude

Here’s my idea, and it actually works within the them.

Let me set the scene for you:

Two buddies, Ken Rondle and Ken Koratsu are returning to their apartment with a super-large Pizza from the Pizza Hovel up the street.

However, the manager of that shop knew that both Ken and Ken are martial artists, and thus stuck a medium meat gluttons’ pizza in the box for them to fight over.

And fight over it they shall!

You take the role of Ken Koratsu as he tries to win the second pizza, even if that means beating the hell out of his best friend! (Though this is nothing new for them, they often fight over food. Not the end of the friendship or anything)

After kicking my first try I started over again and started a new game called  ‘greedy fishing’.

It is about two competitors (one computer) who are on a sea in their boats trying to get most weight of fishes. It is round based and the player starts. Every turn you get a fish with different weight, so does the computer. The problem is you have to have an eye on the maximal weight of your boat and stop fishing if you think the next fish will break you neck. Get as far as possible to the maximum to beat you opponent. But if you get too much fish your boat will sink and you loose the game…

Here a first screenshot:

My game is progressing slowly, but well.

It would be faster if that random momnsense rule wasn’t there tho.

Ok, made a game in about 1 hour.
it’s about destroying GREED!
Every object has only one instance.
It’s the worst game you’ll play this miniLD I can guarantee that.

Release (windows):
http://www.benhem.com/catboxbeta/WorstGameEver.zip
Source (I think it’s possible to compile for other platforms, no tested though):
http://www.benhem.com/catboxbeta/WorstGameEverSource.zip

Yeah, my last blog post was pretty inconsequential and unrelated.
I might try to make another game.

I’ve currently got the sprites of Ken Koratsu done. I’m going to be making the sprites for Ken Rondle after I take a break. It took about 2 hours to make the first set, so I’m guess it’ll take about the same for the second.

After that, the stage they will fight in (Their apartment) and then hopefully something playable. The latter will likely happen some time tomorrow unless I decide to go ahead and stay up tonight. (Which is looking likely)

Hokay, I’ve got both Kens done. Well, Ken Rondle is just a recolor of Ken Koratsu, but I don’t think recolors are against the rules. I’ve also got the background done.

My next step will be to write some actual code. Yay!

If we have music, do we have to have composed it ourselves or can we take music from places?

I’ve got the thing playable (Well, sort of).

Ken Koratsu (The player) can now hit Ken Rondle (The computer) and he will react to the hit. (His health also drops, but he does not get KO’d and does not have a health bar).

Here’s a screenie:

Ken kicking Ken in the face. Also, note the poster.

While the additional rule of no object repeating might sound like interesting challenge to someone (game about greed without massive amount of instances of one thing like coins to be greedy about), it kind of makes it harder for me as this is first time I’m participating.  It has really set me back in my mind and killed some of my enthusiasm to make serious gameplay, but enough whining, maybe this is good thing so I should start thinking small and actually have finished project by deadline. As the competition started at 5 am for me, and now its almost 10 pm, and I didn’t actually had any work done yet due to enjoying myself at beach, going simple is the right thing to do.

I though about using unity3d, but now I have an idea that is better off being a flash game. So I’ll work on that and let you know when I have some screenshots.

I still hate the rule though, sorry.

I’m liking this so far!

The game is starting to feel alot like Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. (Wikipedia link for those who don’t know what that is)

I was originally going to set it up like a normal fighting game, but I like this much better!

Ken Rondle can now hit back, and I am beginning to realize that I am required now to make this a 2-player game as well. (Too much like its new inspiration to pass that up!)

Here’s a screenie of Ken Koratsu getting knocked out:

Finally, Ken Rondle gets his.

I’m making a game about desiring something much more basic than wealth or status:  existence.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 9:09 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve got health bars working! Yeah!

Wow! Today was a roller coaster! I woke up hating the theme, thinking I could never make it work, pissed and moaned, finally got an idea, took back my surrender, and got (most of) a game working! In just about 12 hours! Wow!

So far, I have two Kens who fight each other. The game works like Rock ’em Sock ’em robots, but it’s Rock ’em Sock ’em Two-Guys-Fighting-Over-a-Pizza.

They can punch and kick, and both types of attack form three-hit combos. Punches go faster than kicks, but do much less damage. The two guys are recolors of one another, but that adds to the feel of the game. (Instead of a red robot and a blue robot, it’s an Asian guy in a white shirt and jeans and a white guy in a red shirt and khaki pants)

I have implemented a 2-player mode (2 people on 1 machine) and a 1-player mode (Against an AI)

I also have health bars, each labeled with a Ken’s full name.

(The fill images for the bars are not repeated, by the way: They are stretched. Only using each once, after all)

EDIT: Here’s a link to what I have so far. (Requires Python/Pygame to play)

Here’s a screenie:

Now we can see how they're doing!

I went for a quick and easy 4 hour game due to time restraints. It is made in the shape and setup for an Iphone, but currently just works on Windows. If anyone is interested in porting it to the Iphone, let me know!

http://www.box.net/shared/2lvarxg4yv

After a couple hours of frustration due to pyglet, I’ve decided to switch to pygame.
I don’t think it’s terrible or anything, it’s just because of some concepts I’m unfamiliar with. Also, I know pygame better than it.
As for the game, I’m going all out on this. I’ll post another blog post when I have something to show.
Currently I would say that I’m 99% done with the concept, 25-50% done with images, and 0% done with code.

I have a LOT to do.

I just put the finishing touches on the music and voiceover sounds. Yep, I recorded myself playing a little acoustic guitar for background music and put on a funny cartoon voice for sound effects using my microphone. There’s even an “intro cinematic” of sorts.

Am I finished my game? Not quite: I still have some placeholder art to improve tomorrow but otherwise the game is playable so I will for sure be able to finish.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 11:45 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

First Screen Shot of Trash & treasure

I’ve got the basics of the game working but I need to add more objects, a menu system, a timer, and a high score keeping routines when game over occurs. I plan to use allot more photographs & horrible hand drawn art :P.

Yeah, so after that shamefull release of the first game I wasn’t content, but more importantly it showed me I can still make small games like I used to make on GameMaker, that’s why I decided to give miniLD20 another go and do something that’s actually fun to play.
Here’s the first screen:

It might not look like much but i’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to make a little sperm looking fella with a wagling tail and failed miserably. Still I’m not one to give up so easilly so I added another tail and made it move like an octopus.
I’m still not sure how I’m gonna make a theme-related game out of that but I sure like swimming with this guy around.