LD17 April 23–26, 2010

Done, but uncertain

Not sure if i like it or not, it could probably need a bit more balanceing and depth. But if you get a decent map it can be pretty entertaining i guess.

Try it.

http://www.strangechair.se/WCFTS/

Never the less i’ve had a wonderful time, it has been one of the better game jams i’ve attended so far.

Definitelylooking forward to testing out everyones stuff!

Edit: Time lapse @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dyHdfmQndI

Lonesome Flotsam by Caleb Jewett

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51715/Lonesome_Flotsam.rar

I finished! Will probably fix and polish later.

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 22:16 UTC
Don’t forget to submit it. :)

The Island, The Lily, The Rose

This is the game that didn’t happen. I started out imagining it as a top-down adventure kind of thing, but ended up trying to make it a text adventure; unfortunately the tool was too obstinate to be learned in the kind of time I had with the kind of attitude I had.

Here is the story, interspersed with passages excerpted from the IF I was working on for it:
The main character is a woman called Lily. She has rented a small house and has been using it as a writer’s retreat while she works on her novel. In her time there she has rarely left the room upstairs.

This is the room you’ve spent the last week in (or was it longer?) The walls are just starting to yellow from the tobacco smoke, and a vague grey haze hangs in the room. The study is a dingy and uninviting spectacle; nevertheless, you find yourself drawn to this room. Stairs lead down to the living room, and directly across from the stairs are the desk and chair which have been your constant companions for the last weeks (or has it been months?) Off to your right side is the couch where you’ve been sleeping; the bedroom, somewhere downstairs, remains unused. There is a skylight which lets natural light into the room.

On the Desk are a Brass Lamp, a Typewriter, and a Manuscript.

However, when the player eventually decides to leave the house:

The stale air of the house is abruptly exchanged for the most unusual sensation of sea breeze; particularly unusual given that until recently this house was hundres of miles from the ocean. Now, though, the waves lap gently at the steps of the house. Somehow, while you’ve been writing, everything has washed away. The house stands alone above a featureless sea. Last time you were out here, just down the hill was a small town where you could buy cigarettes and tea and sometimes food; no sign of it remains.

This was about as far as I got before the i7 environment started to become a serious impediment to progress. The gameplay would consist of waiting for the tide to start going out, then wandering out into the ever-shifting ruins left by the receding water and seeing what could be found. After several hours (in game time) of wandering, the tide would come back in and the player would have to run back to the house or drown. The first time the tide came in, it would wash into the living room and lower floor of the house, about waist-height, and would prevent certain actions. The second time it would completely flood the lower floor, leaving only the Study the player starts in accessible. The third time it would wash the house away and the game would end.

The later the game went, the stranger the items that would start washing up. Maybe the first day would be fairly normal things, like a candy bar or shoe, but by the third day there might be a strange alien device or a burning sword or a shrink ray… something like that. The goal would be to escape the island or to otherwise survive/prevent being washed away.

The environment would tend to reflect Lily’s attitudes about herself and the world. Lily is a woman who’s driven herself to isolation believing that that’s the path of true art; she has few friends, never speaks with her family, and is despised by most of her students (of course she teaches, she’s an English major). She thinks of her parents as dead even though they aren’t because that’s more dramatic. She thinks she’s horribly unattractive, but she’s actually okay (though somewhat slovenly). In a nutshell, bitter and misguided and unhappy, but intelligent and generally reasonable. She does much of her writing under the pen name “Rose,” which has always been a flower which appealed to her much more than the lily, believing it derives beauty from being solitary and unapproachable.

That’s the basic set up, but one final note is that the world operates on a kind of twisted literary dream logic. Lily starts with a Pack of Camels (cigarettes) in her pocket, but can take one out and ride it to get more exploring done before the tide comes in. The undo function is initially disabled, but by retrieving the White-Out from the top drawer of her desk Lily can undo past actions. Integrating the alien device with the typewriter yields the literary device, which provides an instant escape from the island… and so forth.

Unfortunately, odds are I’ll never get around to making this game. I like the concept but there are a lot of other projects that I’d like to be working on. Oh well, thanks for reading if you’ve gotten this far, and I’ll see you at LD18!

Radio Silence

radiosilence

Finished! Made today in Unity! 😀

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 22:29 UTC
I like it – is there an ending?
25. Apr 2010 · 22:38 UTC
More or less!
25. Apr 2010 · 22:49 UTC
Yep I think there was an ending. I obtained all the radios and then the game went black. I got impatient as nothing was happening so I exited full-screen and the game crashed, I hope I didn’t miss anything!

Hairgel Quest

Finally finished and submitted..

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but it’s missing a lot of polish I wanted to implement.

Next time, I should really have some base code prepared :).

Islands of the Stone God – FINAL

Phew, 2 hours left, but I’m done  (2 am here) . You can play my entry online here: http://www.jarnik.info/pub/ld17/

Latest updates: sound effects (via sfxr), one music theme (via Musagi), minimap, Redshirt, Starchild, Tribbles, monkeys…

Achievements now totaling 15:

islands_screen03

And the last in-game screenshot (Cuzco the Goat with his wagon in top right corner):

islands_screen04

I wish I had one more day to add some content – I always end up devoting more time to building the tools than actually using them.

Anyway, this was my second LD, I enjoyed it as much as I could.  I took a lot of food photos, I had a great time (huge thanks goes to my sweetheart :*).

Chronolapse has been capturing my desktop for past 48 hours, so the timelapse video should follow.

Tags: final, flash, screenshot

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 22:49 UTC
Wow, I really like this. My only criticism is the scrolling is much slower than the stone god’s movement.

Aaaaaah!

Almost there. I’d better upload this thing… anyway here’s a final screenshot!

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 22:53 UTC
Whoa… Is that what I think it is? Snake, but a puzzle game (meaning if you grow too fast, you can get stuck?

Pincer – nee “Pirate Panic” – DONE

It turns out to have some astoundingly deep gameplay for how few elements are in there. I don’t think I took the level design nearly as far as it could go.

screen

Play here.

Hockey Island is done.

link

Apologies in advance if your favorite island wasn’t included.

Quite happy with how this turned out. It was originally intended to be no fun at all, but I think it’s somewhat fun.

ss2

[FINISHED]

finished my LD game: “Island World” go play it here!:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1548

hopefully it lives up to your expectations 😛

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 23:13 UTC
There’s pirates in the sky, pirates under my base, and no way to kill them. Argh!
25. Apr 2010 · 23:16 UTC
Okay, yeah. I played this a little more thoroughly, and the pirates pretty much ruined the entire game for me. I was left unable to do anything, with just a few blocks and about 50 pirates doing a silly dance underneath my feet.

Still going…

Well, I lost about two hours, cause I had to go to church. Meh, I’ll just dis include music

Still a work in progress

Leviathan is being refitted in the secret hideout

Leviathan is being refitted in the secret hideout


So, It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to finish on time. I’m not really sure how close I am to finishing. A lot of the mechanics and data structures are working, but it’s the little stuff which is the most time consuming, like bugs, adjusting values, chopping up graphics, etc.

Seen here is the refit hideout, which is pretty much functional. What’s left is… connecting this game mode to the half finished shooter game mode. While I don’t have any enemies yet, they already have some data structures in place.

Anyways, tomorrow is a busy day, so I won’t be doing anymore work tonight. Goodnight folks.

Comments

25. Apr 2010 · 23:21 UTC
Your creative process is really inspiring, looking forward to a playable version of this.
25. Apr 2010 · 23:42 UTC
I just realized that the reflection of the islands in the water would probably be darker than the sea blue (a blue which is partly a reflection of the bright sky). Oh well.
geti
26. Apr 2010 · 04:16 UTC
;-;

sucks that you didn’t finish, i want a playable version. That shot looks very nice.
26. Apr 2010 · 05:46 UTC
Aw, poor slave octopus laborers. The wrench guy looks moderately pleased with his situation non the less though. Maybe he has a secret passion for oversized artillery? Being an action/arcade-inclined guy, I’d rather like to see the shooter mode prototyped to a playable state. Would it be realtime and directly controlled, or more like an artillery/tank game where you take turns and aim etc?
Tyler
26. Apr 2010 · 05:46 UTC
Awesome. It seems a little out of scope for the challenge, but certainly a playable game. Looking forward to it.
26. Apr 2010 · 07:50 UTC
I wasn’t very active the first day. If I have had those 10+ hours I wasted, I might have had something playable. The game mechanics are quite simple. I don’t have to code AI, tricky physics, or optimization requiring thingamajibs. However, there was still a lot to do, since I wrote the code from scratch in BlitzMax. I could’ve saved a lot of time if I had used my own GUI includes.
geti
26. Apr 2010 · 08:31 UTC
Wow, it looks like your usual amount of thought went into this. Should be awesome, hopefully I can get it to compile if your laptop is still being slow 😛
26. Apr 2010 · 11:39 UTC
It’s not compiling that is slow. BlitzMax compiles most of my programs in under 5 seconds. However, I don’t have a network (or dropbox), so I have to transfer files on an USB key, compile, zip up, and it’s a bit of a hassle when the deadline is tight.
geti
02. May 2010 · 08:20 UTC
:( no progress?
07. May 2010 · 17:38 UTC
I made some progress actually. Got the enemy waves for the 5 isles working, enemies come and can be shot down by different weapons which are bought/built at the secret base. Explosions and water splashes are in.
geti
08. May 2010 · 06:57 UTC
Well, I’m glad something has been done, it’d be a shame to waste this. Some sort of playable demo would be lovely 😉
madk
08. May 2010 · 22:48 UTC
Ah! A fellow BlitzMax coder! I commend thee.

Submit Now!

We’re just about done here with Ludum Dare 17. This is a reminder that once you finish your entry, you must submit it via the submission system, otherwise we might miss you.

[ Submit Here ]

Feel free to continue working on your entry up until the deadline, then get it together for submission. Submit for whatever platform you can, then get to porting at your leisure. We’d like to open voting about an hour after the deadline, which means people will want to start playing your game. If they can’t run it, they can’t vote for you, so be sure to get your ports in ASAP!

If you have problems submitting, feel free to leave a comment here, or join us in IRC (#ludumdare on irc.afternet.org). Ask for PoV.

That’s it for now. We’ll let you know once voting has begun.

TIP: If you need last minute hosting, TenjouUtena posted a guide how to upload ZIP files to Google Sites.

Comments

nutink
26. Apr 2010 · 00:03 UTC
Hello, My game is finished, but I am having trouble getting it on the internet. Could I perhaps email it?
26. Apr 2010 · 00:09 UTC
165 entries submitted before the ‘official’ deadline, and an unknown number that will be submitted in the next hour or so as people take screenshots and upload their games. Over 170 entries as of this post.

Sad Attempt

Well just less then 1h to go and totally not going to finish something decent so here how my sad attempt look like right now.  Still missing some actual game play ahahaha, now you can just move the boat around the see and islands and that’s about it.

So its definitely a NO GO for me, oh well did have fun experimenting and still have several ideas with the theme islands to make some real games with a bit more time ;-).

Screenshot

Ancient Island

I’ve finished all I can before deadline. I’m still missing an area (the final area) but I’m too tired to design a new puzzle and code it.

Still I think it was good entry considering the time I had, I hope you all enjoy it. I’ll upload a py2exe soon.

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?uid=209

PSnake

I have a game, sort of!

The island has broken apart into white glowing pieces in a freak storm of spiky red things! Chaos! Calamity! Climate change! Who shall save us?

Have no fear, brave citizens! ISLAND REPAIR MAN is here!

islandrepairman3

Golly gosh! Thanks, Island Repair Man!

In about 1.5 hours I have added a level counter, lives, level progression, and win/lose mechanics. Which means I kind of have a game now! Not a particularly good one, but beggars can’t be choosers.

The list from my last status update, with done stuff crossed out:

  • Game-y elements: Win condition, lose condition, lives counter, level progression
  • Physics working better (still chugs on later levels but TOO BAD SO SAD)
  • Graphics that don’t suck rotten eggs.
  • Sound. ANY sound.
  • A public build. Need to remember to statically link the VC++ runtime so more people can run it.

45 minutes left. Better push out a build before its too late! Polish is for schmucks, and people with more than 45 minutes to finish their game.

Artillery Isles, Complete!

Huzzah! I’ve completed my real-time strategy game of sorts, and I just officially submitted it for the Ludum Dare 17 competition! The object of my game, Artillery Isles, is to destroy the enemy’s island encampments before he destroys yours. It’s a fast-paced strategy match of launching missiles at the enemy’s base or at his incoming rockets, redirecting rockets in flight, repairing buildings and expanding to new islands!

It’s better in action, but here’s how it looks:

Toward the end of a match. He's a goner.

Toward the end of a match. He's a goner.

Have fun, and good luck in the judging! I had a great time again this time around, and I look forward to trying out all the other island games for LD17!

Tags: final, LD17

A message

Dear everyone who came close, but didn’t finish their game in time for LD17,

FINISH IT ANYWAY.

With love,
The Hinch

Comments

smn
25. Apr 2010 · 23:22 UTC
Seconded!
25. Apr 2010 · 23:23 UTC
Well said.