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 -_-“