Here is the promised gameplay video: Click here

I also added builds for Linux and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X build is a bit slow at the moment, there are some issues with the texture loader which I need to rewrite for Mac OS X in the near future.
Anyway, the links are on my entry page: Click here

Thanks to everyone who played and commented on my game.

Another great weekend. Ludum Dare is such a special event. You go into it knowing it’s going to be a boatload of work. You know you’re going to lose sleep and probably not eat very healthy. But all the pain and suffering is over in 48hrs and all you’re left with is a game you made yourself.

Play > Ludum Dare Build
Watch > Time-Lapse Video of Development
Link > Ludum Dare #17 Vote Page

Concept Discovery:

LD #17’s theme ended up being “Islands”. To say I was unprepared for this theme choice would be an understatement. I spent the first hour sketching out possible ideas. None of them were really resonating with me. In the back of my head I really wanted to make a Roller-Derby themed game so I decided to shoe-horn it into the “Islands” theme. I talked over the concept with Melinda during dinner and committed to the idea of a Roller-Derby themed side-scrolling, platformer, “chase” game. My technology of choice was Flixel.

Flixel:

In all my previous Ludum Dare entries I’ve used my own custom libraries with the standard Flash Professional IDE. This generally meant a lot of copy and pasting code snippets and writing up simple classes from scratch. After LD #16 in December I started learning Flixel along with Flash Builder. I hadn’t yet built anything to the complexity I was going to attempt with my LD#17 project.

Flixel did not disappoint. It was extremely easy to work with and iterate rapidly within. I had a side-scroller with enemies and dynamically generated platforms within only an hour or so. I’d never used the FlxBlock object before, but these handy items created my random, dynamically generated world.

I actually found I had far fewer excuses to hide in my code. The stability and ease of building my tech meant I was forced to spend far more effort on art and gameplay tweaks. It’s way easier to put off making better art if there’s a tech bug to squash.

Art:

I really really pushed myself here. I really don’t think I’m a good artist when it comes to drawing things. It took a butt-load of effort to start drawing out the roller-girl sprite sheet. I don’t think my sprites turned out very good, but I’m just impressed that I managed to get them to the level they are at.

My background tiles I’m a lot happier with. I used some reference shots from MegaMan 6 and basically copied the lighting techniques pixel by pixel.

Using the typical NES Palette was also something I’ve wanted to do in a long time. It took a bit of trial and error over the weekend to get my Photoshop workflow down such that I was always exporting .png files with exact NES colors. I’m particularly impressed with my title screen which has a photo of me (taken on Sunday morning).

Pressure:

I barely felt pressure this weekend. The confidence of working from a strong codebase with so few unknowns meant I was rarely in the situation of having crazy annoying showstopper bugs. I kept my scope very tight figuring it was better to polish something small than to overreach. In the end I decided to submit about 4hrs before the competition end time.

I mainly stuck to my typical schedule of Concept Discovery & Prototyping on Friday night, Production on Saturday, and Polish & Tuning on Sunday. This has worked well for me on two LD48 entries now.

Overall:

I got to do a lot of new things this weekend:

• Build a platformer
• Complete a reasonably sized project in Flixel & FlashBuilder
• Go outside my comfort zone with pixel art
• Play with the NES Pallette

I did all of this without stressing too much or hurting my brain nearly as much as LD #16. I wasn’t taking the game too seriously either (as you can probably tell) so I had a hell of a lot of fun just making it as absurd as possible.

My end game barely connects to the theme of “Islands” so I’ll most certainly take a points hit there. But I do feel pleased in the fact that Roller-Derby 20XX: Mega Islands of Awesome is quite fun!

When is LD #18 again? What? Not till August? Booo…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=2096

Banana Joe is a simple platform made in flash cs3 and paint.net

Do you like Pirates ? Pay attention to crabs and bats.. the are nasty!

Maybe I’m just being anal here, but the rules of the competition clearly state that

1. All content must be created during the compo
2. Source code must be provided

There are still occasional entries with images obviously taken directly from the web.

And in many entries, the source is forgotten (ignored?). Some even claim proudly that their game is closed soure…

I know it’s an honor system, and it is very unlikely that people will actually check your source for copy pasted code. But how long can it take to zip your project folder and upload it along? You can even just put it in a single archive with the compiled game if you can’t be arsed to make two different zips.

Now it’s too bad because the game are good. But how should these be judged? They should theoretically be disqualified. Should they receive N/A, or minimal grade on Overall?

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t pay attention to that aspect, but somehow it’s bugging me. Has an admin advice on the conduct to take?

Okay the title sucks but I invented it as I was drawing it for the main screen. Since it was an image I was too lazy to change it later.

The game was made with ruby 1.9 (very cool language) and gosu (very cool hardware accelerated library). I personnaly think it is a much better alternative to python/pygame mostly because its faster (forget about doing side scrollers with only pygame).

So, first LD for me (but who cares). I decided not to make an engine from scratch to be faster, so I used mine. I needed to make some improvements , like for example , the introduction of water.

But it took much more time than I tought. And the final result is far from being polished. I think a game like this requires too much polishing because there is some kind of physics , AI and a gameplay to balance.
My next game will be something more predictable. I plan to make an adaptation of a board game. It will be turn based and won’t need drawing skills of death to do something okay.

About the gameplay of the game :

The idea was to make something between “evo the quest for earth” and “super mario” but more nervous, a la “sonic”.

For the aquatic part , you’ll have noticed that the bite attack is pretty useless , because you can’t hit without being hit. In evo your caracter can attack farther than the size of its body. I could have changed it but that would have been too strange that your enemies have a much shorter attack range. And the idea was to make the aquatic part depends of what you do on land. So I introduced the bonus (things you can throw at your enemies while in water). They encourage exploration.
But you can attack the jellyfishes.

The land crushing attack is not working so well because enemies often have the time to attack you before being crushed. You really need to land straight on them , in spite of my effort to increase the size of your hitbox when you are crushing something.

The game seems to be very hard , but it’s on purpose : Without the fast brown fishes , you wouldn’t have to be creative and find a way to progress. This makes the game less linear.
The most obvious way to beat the fishes is collecting items.
You can also jump on them by doing an exploit that consists of taking speed by going down then moving up and jumping out of the water , as they are down (see the videos).
You can stick very close to the spikes so they die trying to get you , like in this picture :

Theses “features” were not really done on purpose , but they add something to the game.

REMINDER – Level 2 walktrougth : http://www.youtube.com/user/Ickylevel#p/a/u/2/vI5h5vlD0KE

YARGH! Post Mortem

I enjoyed that, that was a fun weekend
Course not everything went to plan, but a number of things did, and after having had a few nights sleep, I can reflect over things with a clearer mind.
So click the link below for more details!

Tha Booty!
Quite a lot of things worked out this time.
The graphics were actually passable for a change! Though the tiles could do with a bit of work as I didn’t do them in any sane manner ( each were done seperately as a unique 64×64 image.. it’s magic that most of them fit together! Well, magic and the power of GIMP’s rotate tool 😉 )

The idea was fairly simple as well: capture all the forts!
The process being a bit more involved, but not by much.. you start off near an island with one ship, a full set of crew, and 1000 gold.
Capture forts, use their gold to make more men and ships, and repeat. Occaisionally finding chests for extra booty, or risking the mines for even more.
Of course, there are five other “beards” in the area doing the same thing, along with the “non-beards” ( the neutral/mutinyed crews. )
Course, it didn’t quite go to plan ( as described below in The Scurvy! ) but, actually, a lot of that is in there, just not fully wired up.

Although there’s not a great deal of game there, it is still somewhat amusing to fiddle with the amount of units the AI gets, and see how quickly they decimate one another!

Tha Scurvy!
Unfortunately, a fair amount went quite wrong.

This will be the last use of my engine in it’s current state.
It’s just too clunky to continue use, as I had to do a fair amount of dodgy hackery for things to work.
It buffered mouse input, for instance.. so that when the game lags, it queues it up and goes mad!
It also has to do a rather obscene amount of redirection to get it from the input system to Lua in the first place.
The keyboard also wasn’t helping much as it wasn’t picking up half the keys, and I had to write custom “debouncers” to deal with key presses. Yuck.

The renderer part isn’t exactly optimised either as it will draw each one of those tiles individually, rather than do them in batches of the same type.

Design wise, I did my usual madness of making the scope perhaps a bit too much. Though I dare say that without the oversleeping and engine bugs, I more than likely would’ve got the game done – minus menus and sound.. it’s not far off it as it stands.

Tha Plank!
There’s still a lot of feedback missing, as pointed out by xeon06 in the current comments. When you move units about, they get queued up in a waypoint system, and there’s no real indication of that actually happening.
Ironically, there is a set of hud icons in the player sprite sheets.. but I didn’t get round to using them.

The map.
Done in a text editor.
By hand.
With a sheet of grid paper with reference codes for all the tiles.
Madness.
I need to build a tile editor 😉

To be honest, continuing it in it’s current form would be quite difficult due to the engine falling apart now.
It’s served me well, but it’s time for a new one!
That said, I still enjoyed making what I did, and it may not be as complete as I wanted, there’s still a fair amount there and you can see the direction I was heading

With any luck, a new engine will prompt me to actually finish these things!

Oh and in reply to Endurion about Trend Micro giving a false positive, it probably is just that.. the Windows build was done on a brand new squeaky clean install of Windows 7 that had just finished installing itself that morning, and has avast! anti-virus running on it and didn’t find anything.. if you’re wanting to be extra safe though, the source is there for you to recompile if you like.. you’ll need CodeBlocks to do it under Windows, and probably need to do some fix up to the .cbp project as I think I’ve removed event.cpp but not updated the project file.

This was my first ever Ludum Dare, and it was even more awesome that I had ever expected.  I had a blast with the Global Game Jam a few months back, and that made me even more tempted to test my abilities amongst the best game makers in the world for Ludum Dare 17.  After 48 hours of intensity, here is my result:

I also did one of them fancy time lapses that you can check out on the youtubes. And check out the actual submission page for the game and play it!  It’s pretty rough right now, but I really want to continue to work on it and refine it into a bigger project afterwards.  So a big thanks to Ludum Dare for giving me a huge creative energy boost!

-Love,
Kyle

For now that’s my High Score on my favorite game so far… This one got me hooked up for hours!

Now i’m preparing a small protection so I can get out of the computer and have dinner…

I wished I could save/pause though =(

Tags: Highscore, Paradise Fort

Finally got Allegro 4.4 compiling on my Linux machine! New download at my entry page.

EDIT: Thanks for your help, Pov!

I tried to update my LD submission to fix a graphical bug. Unfortunately, while the “edit your entry” screen appears fine, pressing “submit” causes the game title, description, and links to vanish. The screenshots, for some reason, survive.

My page is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?uid=1441 if there is anything there to interest you; the game itself is available from http://www.mediafire.com/file/5izfj2ymddr/Jump Pirate_final.exe

The problem is, due to the lack of links it is not recognised as a valid entry. Consequently all my entrant privileges (e.g. voting on other entries) have been suspended. Help!

It’s about that time where I reply to some of the comments

Perrin says …
For a 2 hour game it’s a pretty good effort, could desperately use some in-level checkpoints.

That’s a good suggestion, but I think I prefer it to remain challenging

Neilo says …
Good effort for 2 hours, however it’s pretty damned frustrating!

Yep, I didn’t have much time to sanity check it before I decided to submit – I cut it really bloody close! 😀

Almost says …
My biggest complaint is that multiple hats do not stack like a tower.
Also, distance jumping off the edge of a platform is hard sometimes.

Hahaha! That’s an ace idea.. But I fear it would have gotten unwieldy(or slow :o) so I decided to allow you to wear the hat after you got them all, so you knew when the exit was open if you couldn’t see the exit itself.

Behold, Bouncecrab, Starfish Island!

The game is sadly quite short, but I’m pleased that I managed to get something I could call a “game” at all  This is my first foray into actual game programming, written entirely from scratch using Standard ML and the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL).  Special thanks to Tom 7 for his SDLML bindings.

The Windows version seems to have way-too-fast timings, but I’m told it is sort of playable.  Also, the latest release of the Mac version is statically linked against the GnuMP library, so if you had any problems with it before, please try again.

This past weekend was super fun!  Thanks, Ludum Dare, for existing!

So, it’s been a couple days since the end of the competition, and I don’t have any posts here, so it certainly seems a good a time as any to change that.  I’ll take this time to describe the grand dreams we had working on Eden Island, as well as answer a few things people have written in their comments.  I’d also like to thank everyone for taking the time to review the game and give some good feedback.

First off, what didn’t make it in.  You got to see the pirates, but what you didn’t get to see was the extremely awesome sea monster which destroys the ship.  The art was done, the ship getting destroyed looked perfect–I just didn’t have time to add the sea monster.  Eventually the sea monster will eat your pirates (and probably monkeys, if the pirates haven’t killed them) if there are too many of them.

The concept of the game was not to be plot based at all–it’s not an evolution from sand to trees to monkeys to pirates to sea monkeys–it’s a combination of everything to create a balanced island.  If you have too many monkeys, you are going to attract pirates (clearly for their luxurious fur); if you have too many pirates, you’re going to attract a sea monster; if you have a sea monster, you’re going to have a destroyed island–back to square 1.  While it is a “god game,” you do not have direct control over anything, really; all you can do is influence what is happening.

There is also going to be a lot more interaction between elements in the coming versions.  For instance, you might notice now that if you have multiple waves of pirates, your monkeys will probably stop throwing coconuts at them.  That means they have run out of them, and they can’t get more.  So the monkey will either have to leave the tree, or a pirate will likely chop it down, since the monkey is no longer trying to kill him.

Rain currently grows your trees, and it will continue to do so.  However, the effect you see now is more for storms; in the later releases, you will start off with light rain, and it will work its way into a storm.  Storms will damage your trees, pirates, and other stuff.

Okay, now for some answers to the comments you have all graciously left us.

First and foremost, several people have stated that the competition must be done solo.  Well, if that were the case, why do the rules make no mention of it?  I started off under the full assumption that it was a solo competition, but when Germille offered his fantastic artistic skills, I closely checked the rules to see if I had to do everything myself.  And guess what?  There is no mention of it being a solo competition in the rules. So, I gladly accepted his services–and clearly the game was better off for that.

Another big point is that it’s not really a game.  Well, it’s not a game yet. Unfortunately I am quite the perfectionist, so I spent far too long getting cool effects in the game than I did developing actual gameplay.  At least I have a lot more planned to go in than what you see now.  Fortunately, I did in 36 hours what I haven’t done on some games in several years.  It was truly an experience.  It was my first Ludum Dare, but it will definitely not be my last.

Okay, now for some specific replies:

smn said it was like a zen garden.  I really like this comparison–it is truly meant to be a world you sculpt and of which you must take careful care.

It inspires jplur to learn flixel: quite a big honor, I believe.  I’m glad my game can inspire anyone to do anything–and learning to make a game in flixel is a noble cause and really quite easy.

increpare: at the moment, you can only have 4 or so plants on screen at a time.  This should mean that you always have monkeys on the ground, otherwise when the pirates come it’d be too easy to just kill them all.  Certainly this will change when there is more interaction between pirates and trees, pirates and monkeys, and monkeys and trees.

zez: about the trees’ bounding boxes: yes, they are quite terrible, and I have redone them significantly in my local copy.  I have also fixed the “drop a monkey on a tree and he starts climbing” bug, as well as the “climb up an invisible trunk” bug.  There are probably also a myriad of others I have fixed, and many more I haven’t noticed.  I definitely welcome all bug reports!

refrag: glad you like it!  I’m honored that it’s your favorite so far.  I think you’ll be really knocked out when the sea monster comes after your pirates, too!  Sorry to hear that you dinged me for not doing it solo, but I was very careful to follow the rules.

xeon06: you’re probably dropping them from too high, so they’re dying on impact.  There’ll be a ‘splat’ sound and graphic for that later…

So, I’m glad if you’ve enjoyed playing, and if you didn’t, I’ll be glad to remedy that!  Let me know what I can do to make it better.

Evil Lair Command uses HTML5’s canvas and javascript. In theory that means it runs anywhere. I decided to do some more compatibility testing based on what I have readily available to me:

Obviously some of the playability depends on the hardware you’re on. Leave a comment if you want to play “what can this stupid game run on” too.

And I’m all out of games. Anyone got bubblegum?

So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…

If I didn’t rate your game it was because:

Some stuff I want to say:

Everybody– Please DO indicate on your title screen how to get to the main menu. And if you include a line that says ‘Press the Any-Key to continue’, please make sure the left arrow works.

(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)

I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!

-TF

hey all,

given the 2 comments on my windsurfing sim, I had to add keyboard commands in addition to the gamepad (which is still recommended!). See readme file in the archive.

Now it’s also compatible with the Xbox 360 controller, as well as the previously supported Logitech Dual Action (and probably many other dual joystick controllers. Also the provided lua DLL does not reference the release vc10 anymore – EDIT: the osg DLL still does ! but it’s not too a problem.

– The new file is at  : http://dl.free.fr/qpLMt33Pg (click on “Telecharger ce fichier” i.e. “download this file”)) . Is there a way to edit the compo entry to add this link and the linux version ?

– EDIT: install the VC10 runtime which is included in the archive (vcredist_x86) or get it from Microsoft here.

– go to bin/ and start ld17_arif.exe

I also updated a few lines of code to add water drag force (auto slow), but no change in the game (data, gameplay).

Later I’ll add jump, better left/right sail effect, wake particles, surfer position, balance, falling, and most importantly a better surfing wave !

As before, control the board/sail with the two joysticks, or S, F and the arrows. F6 to restart.

The original entry is at : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1096

-arif

I say “preliminary” because it’s possible I’ll do a larger more in depth one later.

In making this game I made two huge oversights:

• I used a 2d hardbody physics engine to make a platformer
• I had a total of maybe 12 hours of usable time including a mad bughunt from 12-3AM and most of my basecode writing.

Nevertheless, I’m not disappointed with what I got out of it. I’m just about to do some spriting and make the game look less like debug-draw mode.

Things that went right:

• Everything got up and working quickly
  I did tiles properly and fairly efficiently, I got entities running their update(dt) lines within the first hour, a camera was quick to implement, it all ran along nicely.
• I prevented it from looking too terrible without assets
  seriously, the smoke class made the difference.
• I planned it for destructible terrain from the start
  That way there wasn’t any issues with me destroying tiles and the like, and it wasn’t just a thrown-in game mechanic.
• It isn’t too boring to play
  Me and my brother sat down for a good 20 mins or so having turns and laughing at ourselves. It’s pretty hard, made moreso by the whole running-out-of-space-to-play-in-thing and the you’re-weaker-than-all-the-enemies thing, but I feel that there’s quite a bit of gameplay there to be had, even if most of it’s emergent.

Things that went wrong:

• BOX2D.
  the callbacks i was using basically raped my game silly for just about all of its development time. I spent probably 7 of my 12 hours plagued by a recurrent bug that I just couldn’t squash. Turns out it was fixable by doing the good old mark now,  delete once resolved business, but goddamn I managed to set up those callbacks in a way that made that difficult. So, rule 1 for next time: set up a destruction system beforehand, or don’t use real physics when you don’t need them.
• Poor time management.
  The fact that I ended up with 5 hours development time, 7 hours bughunting should tell you something about how improvised the whole thing was.
• No art

Now with 99% less bugs.

All in all, it’s been an awesome learning experience. Grab/rate the game from Here.

I’ll be working more on this in the coming days, I suspect. It’d be nice to get a version with graphics up, at least, to give the game some context.

edit: fixed broken link.

Quickly whipped up tiles and got a better image drawing function than I had.

Got tiles rendering, and quite a few things ironed out in the meantime. Still need a set of debris sprites, I might do smoke but I kind of like the circles.. I need to make the tiles better though, and improve the level generation. Water should come soon as well.

I’m looking forward to this getting some atmosphere 😀 I’m thinking stormy backgrounds and possibly pirates coming in from the sides of the island too (I’ll need to improve the generation automata 12-fold, i think)

Sprites!

Inthusfar, that’s all the spritework. Heavily Cave story/Oryx/Spelunky inspired. Hopefully I can get the grass, flowers and entities drawing tomorrow, though I still need to do debris sprites and a lot of coursework. We’ll see how it pans out.

Apparently there is a bug in my entry for LD17, where only the sky would load, if you encounter this bug, simply reaload the page once and it should work.

There’s a couple comments now about virus scanners tripping up on Yargh! for some reason.
I’ve tested it myself on a number of virus scanners without any issue, so I can only suggest to update your definition files and so on, since as far as I’m aware, it’s a false positive.

That said, the only thing I can allude it being to is that I compressed the main exe with UPX.
I’ve used UPX before for entries without an issue, so it could be the latest version I grabbed does something that makes some virus scanners thing it’s a bit iffy. As such, I’ve just uploaded an uncompressed version of the game. And seeing as I know some virus scanners would block access to the whole zip, never mind just the exe, I’ve re-uploaded the entire data set with it.

The new version is available here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld17/yargh-uncompressed.zip

It’s the same data, and it’s effectively the same compiled exe ( I did just recompile, just in case ) but if you’re wanting to be super extra safe, the engine sources are in my entry for you to grab and compile yourself.

If there are any more problems with this, please let me know!