So, some cosmetic issues have been decided, but not gameplay.  Is it a maze?  a shmup?  a Streets of Rage clone?  I don’t know! Be forewarned that Vites is hand-drawing, something he hasn’t done since grade school.

I have several ideas and can’t pick one

1. Mind control
2. Enemies as firearms
3. ragdoll enemies toss
4. suicidal enemies
5. latamari ripoff
6. pokemon ripoff
7. explosions

Well, I have a gameplay idea. It involves running the hell away and trying to block enemies from reaching each other, as if they can’t reach each other they can use each other to attack you.

The twist comes when you confuse one of them into attacking enemies… for which they need a weapon. You.

This game will probably feature robots.

i cant think of an idea >:(
ill draw some stuff and see what happens 😀

Tags: D

“Enemies as weapons,” eh? Definitely not my first choice, but I think there’s some potential for creativity and fun there. I also anticipate a lot of very similar games, unfortunately, because there are a few very obvious game ideas in it, but we’ll see. I think I have my (relatively non-obvious) idea about nailed down. This should be good.

But I can’t start a Ludum Dare without proper nourishment!

You know it.

That dinner of champions awesomely consists of homemade P.F. Chang’s Mongolian Beef, Caesar salad, a yummy dinner roll, and delicious fruit punch soda. Now, to get to work. I’ve got a lot to do… By the way, I’m going to be using some base code from my previous LD attempts, which, to be fair, can be found here.

Tags: foodphoto, journal, LD18

for some reason I decided to make a game where you control ballroom dancers. i only have very vague ideas. mostly i just keep thinking about a bunch of people twirling around.

I had 7 game designs for this theme when I left out from the door and almost an hour later, returned with 2 reasonable.
1st design I dropped was “topple the domino enemies side scroller platformer.” – Needed pretty good physics which I wasn’t prepared to do. Wasn’t that interesting either.
2nd dropped design: “Spread anarchy / chaos” was just something that popped into my mind and I couldn’t invent any new ideas for that.
With 5 designs left, each one interesting, in my opinion, I did 1-5 grading of
– how interested I was in doing the game
– how well the game matches given theme
– how unique the design was.
– amounts of game design, code, art and level/moster/other content remained.

3rd game to drop was the Political card/turn based one. Figured it would be difficult to make a proper AI or to make a muptiplayer.
4th dropped game, a Megaman clone, was too much work and not enough innovation.

I was left with “Meatgrinder+cannon on wheels, shooting ground human meat and metal bits from scrapped tanks” and “Puzzle where the evil ruler must remain in rule by pitting the citizens against each other”. Looks like there are plenty of “absorb enemy, shoot him as ammo” -designs so I’m going with the puzzle design. One problem is that I estimate that the puzzle requires more work than the arcade driving/shooting. Guess it’s time to fire up VC#.

My first LD!

Ill be coding: “HateMongers”, a turn based strategy game using a horde of angry protesters from all areas of the political spectrum. Not that’ll actually finish it…sigh. Using FDT/Eclipse to build and the only 3rd party library code I have right now is Tweenlite. This is almost all from scratch, so I don’t think I’ll finish.

Cooking dinner had its effect, I now have an idea for a tower defense game! I’ve since learned that others are also doing tower defense. =( Oh well, mine will be more mine! Yeah, I dunno what that means either. I should get my blank screen up.

Oh, that’s fajitas, mexican rice, and refried beans in the pic.

So it’s two hours in and I’ve yet to write a line of code (on my game, at any rate). This is probably for the best though.

Instead, I spent the first hour trying to get my wireless working on my laptop. I formatted and reinstalled windows last weekend, and I’ve not had to use wireless since. Matters were compounded by the fact that the wireless adapter isn’t actually the model that’s listed on the laptop manufacturers’ website.

The second hour was spent trying to find my old screenshot program so that I can take a timelapse. It was written in VB, and I no longer have the exe, and don’t have Visual Studio 6 installed. So I tried to find something lightweight and suitable online. Nothing really impressed me, so I wrote one. You can download it from here (Windows only). It’ll ask for a path (which needs to end in a slash – ie: C:\Screenshots\”); a count (files are saved as 0001, 0002 etc, so this is the first number); and the time between screenshots in seconds.

So, now I’m going to start on the game. I’ve got a couple of ideas.

The one I’m currently liking is a fairly straightforward take on the theme. It’s a brutal platformer where you dismember enemies to use their arms/legs as bludgeons, and their heads as projectiles.

The other would be a more cerebral game. “You are your own worst enemy”, a puzzle game where you disrupt your future (or past) self by the actions you do in the present. I like this idea, but it would require a bit more thinking to get it playable.

edit: Due to the terrible hack I used for the Screenshot program, it wipes the clipboard each time it takes a picture. Watch out!

So i am now 2 hours in and don’t got much to show, but my idea and game are going to be epic!
Here’s a pic so far.

Zoomed out 2-4 times

2 hours in, I finally have a decent idea and some code down. I’m gonna be taking the theme quite literally. Can’t say more or else I’d have to kill you. This is also going to require me to do pathfinding, which I have never done before, and also some procedural map generation, which I happen to have some experience in, so all in all it’s not too bad.

Having spent the morning thinking of ideas, eating breakfast, thinking of ideas, playing UT3, thinking of ideas, I think I’ve finally come up with something.

The idea
There’s a city (“enemy” city). It’s full of people (and buildings). Things are drawn in abstract glowy lines style, or something, as if you’re watching it through some sort of special vision (which you are). Most of the buildings have no real function, other than that there’s some people in them. Some are more special, like police station, hospital, psych hospital, gun store, liquor store. Something like that.

Now, you have some sort of mind control weapon which you can use on citizens to convert them into your weapons. When they are converted, they will simply fight for you automatically, including trying to fetch guns etc. Of course, other people will probably defend themselves, and it will also attract police and, later, army. Police is more difficult to convert, and army are even more difficult.

Goal is to take over or destroy the city (haven’t decided yet). You only have a limited energy for your mind control device, so you must use it strategically, but luckily it will recharge faster when fighting is going on. I think it could be fun.

Work wise, it needs to generate cities (should be easy enough), then write the rendering code (probably easy), then there’s the actor stuff which will probably be the hard part, followed by balancing. Graphic wise, I will need representation of people. Currently I’m thinking just a vertical line + and icon if they are of a special type (police etc).

Not yet sure if army/police/normal people will have vehicles. Also not sure if I’ll make several custom designed levels, or I’ll just let people specify the variables for the generation. We’ll see (hopefully).

The ideas
Here’s the more general ideas I had before I came up with this idea:

1. Scroller/overhead walk around, catch and throw enemies at other enemies, allow for chain reactions, preferably more abstract representation of things. There should also be coins to collect, of course!
2. Sort of psychological propaganda game, you convince the enemies to destroy the other enemies.
3. Some sort of commerce/trading game where you must make deals that are better for you than for the enemies (probably doesn’t fit).
4. Some more lighthearted idea would be nice… INSERT IDEA HERE.
5. Variant on 1, more of a puzzle game, you can capture certain kind of enemies, and then throw/fire them like a weapon of something on other enemies, over distance or over barriers etc. Stunned ones can then be used as weapons.
6. Ultra Fleet.. oh wait, already did that.
7. Maybe also a variant of 1/5, but instead of capture throw/fire, we mind control the enemies directly, and then control them while they go on rampage, or just hit switches, or whatever.
8. Or there could be a shooter where the weapons are named of LD participants.
9. Or taking 8 further, the game can be a series of boss battles, where each boss is an LD guy, and they attack with something from one of their game, then when you win over them, you get them as a weapon. Sort of fun, but might create some legal issues since I’d want to use some iconic object from some of their previous games.

   Disregarding the enemies as weapons, this could be a fun idea to try make as an slightly bigger project, outside a compo. Then there could be complete levels, with enemies of their previous games, building up to fighting them as a boss.

10. SUPER PEAR ATTACK.

Tags: ideas, log

Whew, it’s been a pretty cool 2.5 hours so far! I have my idea, some plans drawn on paper, a few basic photoshop sketches, and some code written. In fact, I’ve already figured out how to deploy it, and I’ve been pushing it to Bitbucket, so I’d say I’m really flying!

Please visit the following page and let me know if it works for you. I’m especially interested in those of you with Linux and Mac OSes, since I wrote and deployed this on Windows. Let me know if it works for you or not.

You need Java 1.6.0 update 10 or newer, otherwise it’ll just give you an error.

http://insertnamehere.org/birdsofprey/

So yeah. Let me know how that goes. It’s hardware accelerated with JOGL. Also please tell me if it popped up a security warning that you have to accept or not; it doesn’t for me, but maybe I’m just weird. A link to the Bitbucket repository is at the bottom of that page. I’m probably going to bed soon.

Thanks for your time!

Yay! It moves around! Now, to add bullets!

Reminds me of spacewar.

screenshot

ya the sun will fire death rays at you and you have to aim them at the enemys (red thing)
the point, combo, level things are prety ovious 😉
ya il add now featurs later :d
also its going to be hand drawn!

Tags: ftw

Okay, I think I’ve got an idea.  But it’s going to require me to draw a whole lotta different sprites, which is unfortunate since I’m much more of a coder than artist.

… and all my ideas are starting to come together into mush.  I guess it’s time for me to let them rise overnight, so that when I bake them in the morning I get a fresh, tasty game.

This is the source of my strength.

This is my desk, the nerve center of my operation.

This chair is rather old and broken-in, but very comfy. Here is where I relax and code at the same time.

My beloved Hohner Marine Band. For those times when things are going awful, and for those times went things are going spectacularly.

My soft toys. There to comfort me in times of distress.

It’s a good thing I can’t embed this motivational poster, it might give people seizures (waring: might give you seizures). Click though to see the awesome Distractionness. P.S. it’s all HTML, Javascript and CSS, the CSS to make the layout took a while yesterday as I suck at CSS.

On theme related news, I started as a hater, thinking it’s just a ‘game mechanic’ rather than a ‘theme’. But really you can still interpret it in other ways, just think of the definitions and interpretations of ‘enemies’ and ‘weapons’. If one complains that they can’t make an arty game from this, then you’re too stuck on what those words normally mean when applied to a game. Think outside the screen.

Also, 3 hours gone already ohmy.