Here is the timelapse of my game, I hope you apreciate it as I wrote a 12-line custom c# application to generate input files so that mencoder wouldn’t crash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxngui36z64

If anything, this shows that watching to many full metal alchemist episodes in one ludum dare, will effect the overall quality of the game

If you tried playing my game, Hungry Hungry Castaways, and it would not run, it was probably because you did not have the Visual Studio Redistributable. I have fixed this now so you shouldn’t need it to run the game. If it still won’t work try downloading the Visual Studio Redistributable.

Hi Everyone, I have just rebuilt angry stan on a 32 bit os with another distribution of allegro,

it seems to have solved the problems, but I cannot be sure,  I am sorry about the problems, please feel free to grab the new version,  as it should at least run on more peoples machine now.

again a nice screeny for you all

oh and

I’m trying to play, but Stan falls through the island as if it’s not solid over and over at the beginning of the game. Is this a bug?

-Yes it is a massive bug and thanks for letting me know, something wrong with allegro, I think the new build has resolved this issue, I would appreciate it if you could redownload and try it again.

Hey all, the windows binaries seem to be…fixed. DLL’s being a nightmare, but running now…. I hope. I’ve also uploaded the Linux port – it assumes libglut will be on your system, if its not please ‘sudo apt-get install libglut3’ or whatever your prefered method of packet management is.

All files are available in the “Windows” zip on the page. Just run *.exe for win and *.sh for linux

Enjoy!

Oh and the story scrolls SUPER fast on linux machines, sorry about that. Not a “show-stopper” by any means so I guess I’m not allowed to fix it.

Grieve

The goal is to collect 25 starfish.
If you get stuck on an island, try scooting off.

I am working on making a torrent of all the windows versions of the LD17 games. It will be awesome, and I have to do it all by hand, so bear with me. It’ll be done by the end of today though, I promise!

My entry
Islands Far Away

“eat corky”
“I don’t suppose Corky would care for that.”

I wouldn’t recommend messing with Corky!

I found it hard to find the correct command and quit because the parser was such an obstacle.

Yeah, next game I’ll be sure to try to think of any responses that players might have to actions. I just didn’t have the time this time. I spent all my time just trying to learn Inform 7.

One of the funnier text adventures I have played this year 😀 Couldn’t quite finish it tho

Thanks, you should try to finish if you are close. The ending is the best part!

I couldn’t get anywhere. It’d be nice to get some sort of guide here! ;D

Yes, I agree. I have made a hint file. WARNING, THIS WILL RUIN THE FUN OF THE GAME. I would suggest using it only as a last resort.

Here is the hint file:

Hint File

Also, this game is actually better if you use a stand-alone program instead of the javascript version.  You can save your game progress, it is faster and you get better fonts among other things.

You can download the game file here:

Game File

Goodie. Capture rate: 1frame/minute, night time cut and run at 5fps. Video quality is crap, but eh. Nothing I can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjeU7ilMMmY

Tags: timelapse

http://destructogames.com/LD17-archives-win.torrent

It’s up. It’s all the windows links I could download, it’s just under 650MB, and it’s just windows games. Source if the games included it, otherwise just the game. Organized into folders labeled as such:

<creator> – <name>

eg:

demize – Horrible LD17 Game

Download it, hope you can get it because my connection is crap for uploading, and then rejoice as you SEED IT. SEED IT. and then SEED IT some more so everybody can have it 😀

EDIT: Some games may have bugfixes, for example pubby8’s game, Island Guns. This torrent should be fairly recent and stable, but if you experience any problems check the game’s page for bugfixes.

EDIT 2: Please be patient and download this. I’m initial seeding right now to get the initial distribution done as fast as possible, but my up speed seems to be less than 20kb/s. It’ll be done within the next day or so probably, then it’ll all be in the wild as long as you stay on. If you’re the only person with a piece and you stop seeding that piece, nobody can get it. So, please be patient and download it, and wait until there are a few seeds to stop downloading and just download them all yourself.

Just a note to let people know that I’ve linked packaged, double-click-it versions for Mac OS X and Windows on my entry page. The combination of libraries I used, and the limitations of my development environment, made this game somewhat difficult to package, so I’d appreciate some feedback letting me know whether or not the packaged versions work, particularly on different os/arch combos (like 32 vs 64 bit, Intel vs powerpc mac, etc).

(A note, for those of you who downloaded entires via bit-torrent, Capsize! didn’t make it into the torrent since the windows build wasn’t ready at the time).

I borrowed an iPhone to test Evil Lair Command and it almost worked. All the text was being displayed upside down inside and outside the canvas. The text that was still inside the canvas was flickering while the text outside wasn’t being “erased” each frame, so it just piled into a big smudge of pixels. The framerate was low and based on the FPS smudge I think it was single-digits low. And it was darn near impossible to hit any pesky agent boats, though I did accidentally hit one, so I know it’s possible. I think it could work if I could have some more time to work on it with a real iPhone, but I don’t want to buy an iPhone just for this silly game. =p Here’s some screenshots of the grand event.

Bottom line: don’t try to play Evil Lair Command on an iPhone (3GS to be precise) unless you’re morbidly curious. However, if you have an Android device or some other mobile device that supports the Canvas tag, I’d be happy to hear the results.

Download Here

Finally kicked that bug in the face.

More stable!

I’ll do a proper postmortem soon, I’m glad to have got it done even if it’s late, I managed to actually find myself having fun with it in the last few minutes, so that’s a plus. Enjoy.

This Ludum Dare was far more frustrating than the previous one.

My game idea was somewhat more ambitious than SEEK*TOR, but what really killed my progress was trying to use flixel for something it’s not suited for. I spent most of Friday and Saturday trying to bend and hammer flixel into doing what I wanted it to. I managed to code some work-arounds, but I felt like I was doing twice as much work as I should have been.

The game I wanted to make had you swimming around a world as an aspidochelone, or asp-turtle. You would start out small and eat fish and other sea creatures, slowly growing bigger. There would be ships and sea monsters floating around, which you could ram to make them drop their stuff if you were big enough. Once you got big enough, you could start picking up rocks to build an island on your back. With an island, you could pick up people and have them build a village on your back to help you out. There would be different resources that would encourage your villagers to specialize and give you different bonuses, like faster movement, stronger weapons, faster growth, etc.

The two features that I really had trouble doing in flixel were scaling and rotation (specifically, collision detection while scaled and rotated). Given that I had a turtle swimming around in a top-down view, growing as the game progressed, this made things pretty difficult. Also, I kept needing groups of things to move and rotate together, which FlxGroup isn’t quite set up to do. (FlxGroup is very good for pooling objects so you can re-use them. It’s not so good for moving multiple objects as a big chunk.) A minor annoyance that I kept encountering was the fact that it’s difficult to create an object that’s only for display and doesn’t have all the physics-y stuff attached.

With about 18 hours left, I finally decided to toss out flixel and write my own engine from scratch. That consumed the rest of Saturday and a big chunk of Sunday. Getting movement to work was no problem. Switching over didn’t take me too long either, since I tried to match flixel’s organization as I coded my engine. The real headache was getting collision detection and handling to work. I have variously had islands shoot off behind the turtle when touched, trap the turtle and prevent further movement, and stick to the turtle like glue.

So, I didn’t manage to finish my game. On the other hand, I now have a half-way decent first version of my very own game engine!

I have noticed in the voting list that there are strange bronze and silver medals next to peoples names. May i ask what they are?

Hey there,
I’m the author of Beebop The Island Hopper and this is my first Ludum Dare. Previously I’ve made a few entries for The Experimental Gameplay Project which is a monthly contest of creating a themed experimental game in one week but the challenge of making a game in only two days, and the pretty cool community, compelled me to join in this time.

The game itself is very simple: your only task is to press a button at the right time and advance to the next island but a press at the wrong time will push you back to the previous one. Although simple it was a surprisingly good concept and it did stole a few minutes of my time. The graphics turned out okay (thank god) but the sound is pretty damn awful.

The pressure with such a short deadline is no joke and although I didn’t have a lot of hours to spend, I totaled around 8 hours, I really did spend them effectively.

It was really fun and I learned a ton about programming, myself and getting things done. I will definitely try to participate the next time and then I’ll be more active on irc and to post at least once in the middle of the making.

Now all I need to do is to vote.

Cheers

“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”

Well not exactly my case but it’s better to commit and release than to never do so.  So without further ado, here’s my first game I’m releasing to the public.  Cargo Island Drop!

Why so late?

I entered the competition late and I was unable to actually work on the game Saturday.  I had planned on working in the evening but became ill after having the Crab Pad Thai at a friends birthday dinner.  I made a post on Sunday, two hours before the deadline, that I didn’t make it but I wasn’t going to give up so here I am.    I had some extra time today so I spent some making up the lost time from Saturday.  I did it for myself, I did it for those who believed in me but I also did it just to show the Ludum Dare community that you guys are awesome!  Next time I’ll do better planning.  Until then, here you all go!

Misc info:  Cargo Island Drop was built in Unity.  Modeling done in Blender.  Texture work done in Pixelmator.  The music was stock music but seeing as I didn’t have time to make any and it isn’t an official entry into the competition I decided to leave it.  Everything else was done by me, even the art!  First time I UV unwrapped anything that complex!

Web Version:  Cargo Island Drop Web (Unity Plugin)

Windows Version: Cargo Island Drop Windows

Mac Version: Cargo Island Drop Mac

Edit: DOH!  Forgot to include a link to the source:  Source

Please, if you use the source for anything please just drop me a message, I would love to know if it was useful for anyone!  Thanks!

Feel free to leave me any feedback!

I already posted a mini-postmortem in my submission screen, but here’s my expanded version.

First up, I want to give a big shout out to everybody who contributed to Ludum Dare, and to those who made this entire site and contest a reality.  It’s great to see so many people active a community focused on game development.  While this was my first Ludum Dare 48, I’ve participated in community-driven game competitions before and it’s always been a blast.  LD48 was no exception.

Here’s a summary:

• Lack of working debugger/inspector meant much gnashing of teeth.
• Unfamiliarity with Flixel library/AS3 specifics cost me time.
• Spent too much time getting art into a state that was usable.
• Generally spent too much time arguing with my tools, and not enough refining gameplay.

Friday:

The islands theme sort of threw me for a loop.  I wasn’t expecting it, and in fact had down-voted it. But, in retrospect, I admit it’s a good theme.  It’s open enough that people were able to do some really cool and interesting things with it.

After grousing over the theme for a bit and finally having a flash of inspiration, I sat down and sketched up concept art.  I half-expected it to end up as my final art, so I spent more time on than I might normally.  Later, I’m glad I did this.

Now I had a gameplay idea, concept, and a bit of art.  The next step was dumping the art into separate sprites and making sure they were properly configured to work in Flixel.  This part cost me a fair amount of time.  My original idea to use Cosmigo’s ProMotion and do strict pixel art would have been easier on my mouse-hand.

I then created a project in FlashDev and made sure that all of my assets would load up properly via Flixel.  After that, I coded the scrolling background.  My original sketch had everything on one screen, but I felt a bit constrained so I enabled a larger, scrolling playfield in order to make the game level more expansive.  However, I wasn’t able to properly enable the off-screen indicators for enemy islands/fireballs, so I felt that hurt the gameplay in the end by making the game a little confusing.  It would have just been simpler to keep everything on-screen;  Most of the levels I designed did this anyway.

The final bit I accomplished before turning in for the first day was to sketch the little animated islanders in Photoshop.  Photoshop is not meant for pixel art, I’ve found.  It’s incredibly annoying to use for this task.   More time wasted!  But once I was done, I had idle, running, swimming, burning, and praying animations.  This is all I needed from the little guys, so I could at least sign off on them.

After writing the Native class and making sure the little guys spawned properly, I decided to call it a night.

Saturday:

Ugh!  Nasty storms!  They kept me offline until later in the day.  Boo!

Once I finally was able to get back into my form, I started work on the most critical aspect of the game;  Animated fireballs that could be launched at the other islands.  This part was fun, but my unfamiliarity with Flixel started to rear its ugly head.  This resulted in some digging in Flixel code in order to grok the purpose of the FlxEmitter class and how to bend it to my needs.

Then, more time tweaking it so that I could have a dozen fireballs onscreen without grinding my system to a halt.  At the time, I was unaware of the profiling functions in Flixel, so I could have cut out some of the guesswork with this.

Next I finished the animation state code for the islanders.  They convincingly milled about on my islands, and occasionally went to their knees and prayed, but at the time this was just a visual effect.

The final thing I completed before calling it a night as implement the fireball arc code, so that they fell convincingly, and the collision code, so that the fireballs landed on the islands.  The collision code kept me up for a while.  There was some silly little overlooked error that prevented the fireballs from exploding properly.   I don’t even remember what it was, exactly.

Sunday:

Hoo boy!  Down less than 12 hours, I didn’t have a working game at all.  I just had pieces.

The spawning code for islands worked.  You could launch fireballs and they would impact the other islands, set natives into poofs of flame.  This was all fun, and such, but not a real game.

First up was writing the prayer-power system.  Islanders prayed, increasing power, which powered the fireballs.  I also coded the health/power bar system and drew two little Tiki heads to represent the gods.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to add in an expanded graphic of your islanders worshiping your Tiki (the horned red-eyed god), which would have clued a player in which of the two sets of islands they controlled.  (Hence the odd left gap in the dialog boxes, and the confusion some pointed out about where to aim the fireballs. :))

This was all cute, but disaster struck!  Sometimes, when destroying an island, my islanders would swim to a nearby island and join it (as intended).  However, they wouldn’t stop joining.  The game quickly crawled to a halt when over 50,000 sprites were rendered.  Oops!  A lack of a Flash debugger really hurt me here.  I wasn’t aware that the Flex SDK comes with fdb, so I had to debug the old fashioned way:  Hack and slash until the problem went away.  I eventually narrowed it down to a bug in the abandonment routine, which checked to make sure the islanders were swimming towards a still-existing island.

The final pieces were falling into place, but I was quickly running out of time.  I wrote a very simple AI, which simply only had one job due to unfinished game mechanics:  Select where to aim on the screen.  That wasn’t too difficult, but a subtle bug would later come to bite me concerning AI aiming…

There were two components left for what I considered a”complete” game:  The bumper code, which is my term for things like overall game state transition, level changes, and so on.  And the construction of at least three levels.

The bumper code wasn’t hard to write.  Just simple state transitions, a quick five minute title/won-the-game screen.  But this is when the subtle bug reared its ugly head.  I had less than 15 minutes to the deadline, but when you switched levels, the AI pulled a brilliant move of randomly flinging fireballs instead of aiming at the player-controlled islands!  Argh!

I went ahead and submitted the game as-is, not realizing that we are given a chance to fix such game-breaking bugs after the deadline.

I managed to find the cause of the bug a mere five minutes after I hit submit;  When changing level states, I wasn’t clearing the AI targeting parameters.  As simple as the AI was, it just targeted the same (now non-existent) island location as before.

This was due to oversight caused by my rushing.  Instead of taking the sane route of simply switching game-states between levels (and storing persistent info elsewhere), I tried to cram everything into the same state and just cleared the commonly data structures between levels.  I mean, the game isn’t that complicated, right?  This is where having no working runtime inspector/debugger really hurt me.

In Closing

All-in-all I had a blast!  And the resultant game is, IMHO, worthy of pursuing as its own complete project entirely outside of LD48 even if it doesn’t come close to winning.  I couldn’t ask for more!

See all of you next time.

Tags: LD17, postmortem

TAB: Island Rescue (LD17)
By: Fydo

I dunno if anyone cares, but for the guitar enthusiasts in the compo, you might enjoy a tab of the song I made for Island Rescue.


/ = Slide
~ = Vibrato

------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
-----5-------------------------5----------
---7---5-/-3-/-5-/-3-/-5-----7----5~~-----
-5-------------------------5--------------

------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
-----5------------------------------------
---7---5-/-3-/-5-/-3-/-5--5-/-7-/-5-/-3---
-5--------------------------------------5-

------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
-------10------------------------------10-------------------
----12----10-/-8-/-10-/-8-/-10------12----10~-10-/-12-/-10--
-10------------------------------10-------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
-------10--------------------------------------------
----12----10-/-8-/-10-/-8-/-10---10-/-12-/-10-/-8----
-10-----------------------------------------------10-

So, a small collection of post-compo stuff here, timelapse, post mortem + bugfixes.

My timelapse is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2UFsvPK4k if anyone’s interested. Looking back I spent a *lot* of time creating levels, but I kind of knew that already. It’s kind of fun to see them grow, though with the benefit of hindsight, taking more screenshots, and producing a ‘highlight reel’ after the event would lead to a more satisfying video.

What went right:

Had a clear design idea. I was lucky enough to start Saturday with a very clear idea of the game I wanted to achieve. It was (overly) ambitously large, and relied on being able to do a large amount of decent level design in a short space of time, but having such a clear vision of what I wanted kept me on task, and prevented me from wasting much time simply trying things out.

In-engine editing. I’ve been converted to the idea of doing level design in game ever since playing around with Cube god knows how long ago. So early on I wrote a system to support editing of levels without leaving the game (I didn’t even have an edit mode to flick into, editing happened literally at the same time as playing). There’s simple no way I’d have been able to design as many screens as I did if I’d had to keep flicking between level editor and game (or, worse, text editor and game).

Simple mechanics that interacted nicely. The 3 core mechanics (springy things, ice, and rocks) were chosen mostly on a “what can I implement quickly” basis, but I was very happy with how well they ended up slotting together.

What went wrong:

Too damn big. Whilst having a clear idea was great the specific idea I had committed me to making waaay more content than was comfortable within the timescale. There are 40 screens in the final game, and nearly as many puzzles, and this is *after* I’d scaled back my original vision significantly. I took a huge chunk of total time, probably approaching 8 hours on pure level design. I ended up having to cut other things I wanted to put in (extra animation, localised fauna etc.) as a result. Having said all that it was really cool to realize something on that scale.

My music is dull, repetitive and quickly annoying. Just a combination of of it being a generally a weak area for me, and having very little time to burn on it (1hr fairly late into Sunday, when I was completely knackered). I came very close to not bothering including music at all though, so I guess overall I’m glad I managed to put something in. More practice required before next time though.

Less testing time than it could have done with. There ended up being some significant and unpleasant glitches (infinite-loops, an inescapable area etc.) that I just didn’t have enough time left to find. Ties pretty heavily into the “too damn big” point, with that much content there’s going to be problem areas, and it’s going to take hours to find them.

Not taking Monday off work. Simple, but regrettable, trying to do a full days work after a 36hr game development marathon was not fun!.

So, all in all, I shot pretty high, way too high in fact, so it feels pretty great that I managed to realize my original idea fairly convincingly.

The glitches + bugs have been annoying me a lot, so I’ve been working on a fixed up version, available to play at http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/islands_better.html. So far it has fixes for all the specific glitches people have reported (thanks for the info!), as well as a few I found myself. Also I’ve put in code so that if anyone does run into an icky infinite loop situation it should at least recover from it fairly gracefully. I also plan to add some sort of progress saving system, so that it doesn’t have to be completed in one session.

Anyway, that post was pretty epic all told, congratulations if you made it to the end

Now I’ve just got a lot of games to play 😀

I enjoyed the compo thoroughly, and I was so happy with my entry that I’ll sure keep working on it! I’ll probably add more enemies, cannon types and such stuff, along with online highscores. You can see some of the new enemies in that screenshot – the Poison Bomber, and the Balloon Bombs.