I have an almost playable game ready 1 hour past LD48 compo deadline. I got to the point I regret not staying up all night Saturday and spending too much time fiddling with the graphics. The game is a real-time game where bugs are trying to breach the reactor shield kamikazee style. You can operate various gates to redirect the bugs away from your reactor and into each other. When all the bugs have destroyed each other you advance to another level. Next compo I need to spend less time on graphics.

I used Python/Pygame and PSE8 for graphics.

Tags: progress, screenshot

…It’s been emotional. Well, not so much emotional as tiring and mildly stressful. Hell of a lot of fun though.

For my first forray into the Ludum Dare I managed to make a fully functioning prototype with only two known bugs, neither of which even come close to breaking the game. =D
It was actually a fairly substantial game given the time, I’m pretty proud of it.

Brace yourself for the upload of my Timelapse at some point tomorrow (it’s actually uploading as I speak) and a post-mortem at some point during the week. Probably saying that next time I’ll use an actual engine and a different language.

But for now, I think it’s time for sleep. Good night.

So the competition is over now!  Hopefully everyone got done what they needed to.  I ran a little short on time, but managed to come out with a fairly playable game.  You are Fromulus, an elemental wizard.  Your goal is to use the elements on the enemies to get them to kill each other.

Pew pew

Press Z to shoot and X to cycle between Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.  Each has its own abilities (except for Earth, which I didn’t complete, so it just shakes the screen).

Water can freeze enemies, which make good obstacles and heavy paperweights.

Fire makes the enemies scream and run about, setting their brethren on fire, too.

Earth does bupkis.  But it looks pretty cool, in a generic shake-the-screen sort of way.

Air turns your opponent into a screaming projectile.

Anyways, that’s my game!  Hope you enjoy playing it!  I’d love to hear any and all feedback.

I didn’t really have a playable game at the time of the deadline, but I thought I’d share my game’s current status.

DOWNLOAD CURRENT PLAYABLE DEMO (Windows executable)

Enemies following and some musical instruments.

Tags: demo, download, jam

Wow, that was intense! It’s always the same, you figure there’s AGES left, and you have all these plans for different types of enemies, scripted events, attack waves, whatever. And then suddenly there’s one hour left and you have to do this mad scramble to put it all together into something resembling a game.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. I’m not entirely sure how fun it is, but I certainly had fun making it which I suppose is all that counts. The lasso turned out to be AWESOME. Verlet integration is cool. There was a very definite ‘moment’ during the development, when it went from ‘a screen with two men on’ to suddenly an actual fun game.

And adding some basic AI navigation suddenly seems to make everything spring into life. It’s a shame the “pathfinding” (hah!) is so terrible. I was planning to go for a very “Bubble Bobble” feel to the thing, but I guess I would have needed another week to make that

Pics!

I worked on AVOIDAL for 26 hours and took screenshots every 30 seconds. This three minute timelapse video is the result. There were a few times I forgot to restart my timelapse so there are a few tiny things missing but most of all the interesting asset creation (like graphics and sfxr and music) is in there.

Here is my timelapse for AVOIDAL on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtZNylG74M

Tags: avoidal, timelapse, youtube

I have a laptop which runs Ubuntu/Morphix/Knoppix/Debian/GNU/Linux (Note to RMS: This is what happens when you insist on using a / on the whole lot, and yes, Ubuntu is based on Morphix, which is bStuff it). As it turns out, my entry runs better on that than it does on FreeBSD (oddly enough), and I have SO MANY FLIPPIN’ FLASH GAMES IT’S NOT FUNNY.

So, stuff I’m not fond on, in order:

Unity seems to work really well in wine.

Stuff coded in C++ with Microsoft’s Vizzel C++ has a tendency to not compile on a real C++ compiler.

My laptop has Flash 10 and it works.

Game Maker games are a pain in the arse to get working with respect to the mouse – I have to mess around with winecfg to be able to click on stuff correctly. If you don’t make your game nicely configurable, and your config is hell, I will struggle horrendously with this.

XNA games will not work AT ALL.

So there you have it. Another flippin’ list. Because you really could do with another list, couldn’t you?

Playable Version, Windows

The problem was, I ran into a pathfinding bug, and while fixing that, didnt get time to do any artwork. I also didnt make use of any kind of level editor, the level is just a flat piece of ground. The picking is still a bit funny, if you select a minion you can’t select the necromancer without right clicking, but you can swap between monsters. I actually wrote this with support for multiple selections, but having run out of time, I didnt bother with it. You also can’t tell the difference between the types of enemy, because I only created one sprite.

I’m now going to submit this as a Jam entry, but I’m going to still stick to the rules of the compo, just without the time limit. Ready for the jam entry, I will complete the following, currently missing, things:

0) art for all 5 kinds of monster
1) Impassable terrain
2) upgraded camera with zooming, restriction of movement to the level only, and rotation (I planned for rotation at the start but didnt get around to it)
3) monsters rotate to face the direction they are heading in
4) group selection with a draggable box
5) the remaining 2 spells (absorb and consume) will be working
6) The level will be a small city with automatically respawning cops / civilians.
7) There will be a linear “tutorial” at the start.
8) The cursor will be replaced with a dynamic cursor with move, attack, select, and cast spell animations.

Controls:
Select a monster: left click
Clear selection: right click
Move screen around: drag with MMB

Move monster around: select it and then click the square you wish to move to
Make monster attack something: Select it and then click what you want it to attack
Hide / show the bottom menu: Click the blue border at the top

To cast a spell, select the necromancer (the guy at the top left who looks the same as all the other guys) and press S (to make a skeleton, which will look like all the other guys) or D (to make a zombie, which will look strikingly familiar to all the other guys) and then click a corpse (which will look like all the other guys except dead)

To cancel spell casting, right click.

Pretty  happy how the game turned out:

– 10 levels of raising difficulty

– knights, horses, balloons & different tower guns, all animated

– global high scores via http://www.gamercv.com/games/14-gnorf

– sweet readable ruby source code

Play it @ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1087

Submission page is here. It’s a shootemup in which you can commandeer the enemy ships.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1168

It'd be easier to just steal the big ship, silly player

This was fun. My game isn’t very finished, as a bunch of the little features and polish are missing, AI is boring, there is very little variety in ships, and the ship spawn waves are on loop. Also, I never got around to making the pretty laser do damage, and a useless weapon isn’t much good so it’s removed from the ships. I’ll probably do some of these things later, and then get lazy and not properly finish the game. However, it is playable in it’s current state.

Timelapse video

Play online

LudumDare entry (rate)

And not in the quirky LÖVE sort of way either.

Seriously, these game jams are alot of fun, and Ludum is a wonderful example of online community presence. Every time I compete in one, I expect some great games, only to be blown away by the sheer magnificence of skill and imagination everyone here possesses. I am proud to count myself as one of you, and will certainly be around for as long as possible.

That is all.

Yup, finished last minute. Kept a log at http://ryanhallcs.wordpress.com and did a fun timelapse at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlGbOOXlZLE.

What fun! My first competition and I actually finished – almost none of the extra features were implemented but I only really wanted to create a ‘full’ game. Unfortunately I used XNA so it’s limited to Windows, but I’ll be branching out soon. I wanted to stick to coding and hadn’t practiced enough in other engines. Next time thought, which is definitely a new goal and I’m really excited about it. This time, simply submit, next time, submit a game playable in most OS’s. Hope everyone had fun as well!

Title Screen

Tags: final

My entry is called Protractor.  More info and video on my website.

Link to entry page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=34

Well, here it is. I wish it were as fun as it looked but it’s horribly incomplete, as usual. I’d keep working on it tomorrow for the jam except I have to go to work.

All code and assets were created within the 48 hours, but a last-minute crash bug in release mode that only happened outside of the IDE (yikes!) forced me to spend a couple of hours adding printfs to track it down to the new image loader i’m using. That’ll teach me to try new code for a compo (or at least to not wait until the last minute for a release build).

Was a lot of fun, and exhausting. Can’t wait to try some of the others. But first … sleep.

HINT: If you try it, you can press ‘1’ and ‘2’ to jump to some bonus levels that I made for testing.

Tags: final

I’ve made some minor bugfixes to make my game easier and less annoying. The bugfixed version can be found on my entry page, marked “Bugfix (Post-deadline)”. In the interest of fairness, and if you vote on my game, please only judge the original pre-deadline submission marked “Web (Flash)”.

And I didn’t submit anything.

Not like I had anything worthwhile, so not a big loss.

But, I still love how Ludum Dare helped me work on my non-LD game.

I won’t post a link yet, for it’s not fun yet.

The title pretty much speaks for itself. I sat and sadly watched the timer kick over the last few seconds, and felt sad that I had not completed my entry. It’s not even close to finished.

Perhaps joining in on a 48 hour game making competition was a little too much for someone who has never made a game before? I like a challenge, and thought a little too highly of myself, it seems.

The one thing I will note is that I refuse to say I failed. In fact, the truth quite the opposite. During the past 48 hours, I have created more of a game than I have since I was eight and decided that making games is how I wanted to spend my life. I have a game sitting in front of me just begging to be continued, and that’s something.

So, as is popular to do, what went wrong?

• Familiarity with my tools. It had been a long time since I had used Construct, and a lot of the basics I’d forgotten. I should have spent the time before the competition getting re-acquainted.
• Stuck on logic. A lot of my time was spent bashing my head against a wall when I was stuck on an idea. It took me way too long to work out how to make my enemy detect whether I was within a certain distance of them in order for them to shoot at me.
• Lack of preparation. My decision to take part in Ludum Dare was a very last minute one, spurred on by a huge motivation injection from the Freeplay Independent Games Festival the weekend prior. Given more time to prepare, I would have had a more clear weekend, and also other things like supplies, and a sleep schedule  that would have been helpful also.

As I said, I may not have finished what I set out to do, but now I at least have something which I can expand upon in my own time. It was a great experience to try! Hopefully come Ludum Dare 19, I will be a little more prepared.

Apparently as I was doing my final touches to the game pre-release I changed a line of code that messed up my whole life system causing permanent invincibility!

This but is now fixed in Version 1.1. So the 10 people who downloaded version 1.0 please update Thanks!

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/arcade/ace-disguise-master/3307/

Also to the 3 of you who had my Version 1.0 of my source code that has been updated as well. Please re-download thanks!

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/ace-disguise-master/files/3307/

Since 8 hours ago was 10 am and I didn’t actually sleep, I left the blog post until now. Anyway, even among the issues like power outages and the rather worrying results of the Australian election I managed to get a game done… which has better graphics and music than I’ve ever made for a game before. Luck, I guess.

So I present Robocolosseum!

Feedback has generally said it looks and sounds cool, but there’s definitely a “Wait, what’s going on here?” factor. Essentially, you are in an arena with many cannon-bots who fire each other at you. You can block them with walls, dodge them, let them fire at each other or even jump in a cannon yourself and smash through them!

Feedback is always appreciated, I will definitely update it if there is a serious bug but leave links to the original versions valid.