Got the leve logic done, and finished level 2, complete with lava pits and the Orb of the Sun!

9 hours to go and millions of things still to make (and a WoW raid in the meantime)… So I got about 4 hours of real work ahead of me… :\

Task list:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• End of level (portal thing)
• Main menu
• Title screen
• Game over screen (?)
• Sound
• Music
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Level 4
• Level 5
• Load/Save
• ….

TADAH!
Also it seems the human limit is 28000 points while 45000 are possible.

Now listening to: Strange Comfort – Bit Shifter

Sorry, I can’t capture audio with what I’ve got right now… but you’re not missing much:

LD #20 Demo1

As you can see, I’ve got movement, scrolling, and collision pretty well covered… still need enemies, combat, status screen, NPCs, bonus items… oh, and the in-between scenes need more coding (the hard-coded levels)

Tags: LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, pygame, python, video

Almost There! All I need to do now is make the music!

Here are a few screen shots:

Tags: cursors, game, LD20, screenshots, xedfire

This really isn’t going great, but I’ll keep stabbing away at it. Having a lot of problems with the character and animation, so I’ll quickly animate the character again. o_o

This is obviously late, but we couldn’t get a good picture at night:

Wow… 11 hours without a post. Well, in a way that’s good… I haven’t really lost steam working on the actual game yet, so I’m still devoting energy to that. I didn’t sleep last night. The plan is to stay up until LD compo is over, and then crash until work Monday morning. (and of course, as I started to write this post, I fell asleep in my chair)

In the meantime I’ve gotten enemies implemented, and you can shoot at each other and make each other disappear… there’s explosion noises (all sfx are created with sfxr) but no explosion animation yet. (I’ll probably end up using one of the explosion generators i found, if i can get one of them working :P)

Obligatory screenshot! Now with most stuff except explosions and bugfixes.

If anyone wants to try it out, all you should need is PyGame and Python, (which means theoretically it should work on Linux, Windows, and Mac as-is) and you can grab the source using Bazaar:

bzr branch http://dev.skewedaspect.com/bzr/whitelynx/ld20x6/trunk/

The code is released under the MIT license, and the content is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

It’s approaching 3am, and I may just have enough time to pop in some kind of music. May have to optimise my renderer and script code slightly, but I should have the time to spare. Don’t plan on sleeping just yet.

The game likes that you have gotten this far ^_^

Pretty much like the armor : you can equip (E) one, sheath (S) one, look at one through inventory screen for description. Both pieces of equipement make your strength and agility better, so you can fight better.

Now, to Misc. Drinking potions and using misc items will make your stats better, or worse in a permanent way ! There won’t be random effects like Rogue though, I’m too short on time. As it is, it shouldn’t take much time to implement.

Then, mobs : mobs will be generated throughout the map, and as i’m missing time, will always do one of two things : if not next to the player, move in his direction; and if next to him, attack the player. This way I won’t have too much work, but it still means coding a new bit of the engine whereas misc is only pasting and adapting existing code. With luck, I’ll have time for more graphic work.

Here’s a screenie :

This sword is nasty.

I am quickly approaching my self imposed deadline of “6 or 7” and have a bit of stuff left to do. Oh noes!

I gotta make a opening screen, a help screen, and a death screen, or else this game will be completely incomprehensible.

The good news is that I now have music, and some particle effects. The bad news is that is where the polishing ends. Good thing that I meant to make it so ugly

Tags: update

The final dinner before the deadline.

It was too delicious so I had no time to make a photo. Here is a drawing :).

So I lost about 6.5 hrs while messing with collision… I did get it working though!

Now, on to gravity flipping!

Screenie:

Woke up this morning feeling very sick, dizzy, and foggy. I was more tired than when I went to sleep last night. Right now, I’m less drowsy but I have a splitting headache.

I can’t really work on a game at this point.

I’m really ashamed of myself. I shouldn’t quit, but I might have to. I don’t know what to do. On one hand, if I don’t quit, I’ll have a shit game at best and probably feel sicker tomorrow. On the other hand, if I back out I’ll have to live with the fact that I gave up, and that’s something I really don’t like the thought of.

I don’t know whether I’m going to finish a game or not, and I’m really ashamed of that.

— Mr. Dude

Things are going really well. Had a slow down this morning due to a lack of sleep. It’s now 3am and I need to wrap this up, hand it in and sleep for work tomorrow.

Really enjoyed the comp so far.

PS: As before, all the graphics are pure CSS no images.

Time won’t stop even if I wish. Minutes and hours are passing by like snowflakes in heavy snow storm but there is progress! I’ve done quite some stuff in last few hours if I can boast. Enemies are implemented, lighting system updated and some additional graphics done. I want to make more than 2 enemies at the moment but I’m afraid 9 hours will turn around like nothing and that’s why I have to concentrate on most important stuff – dying, completing a map and most of all main menu.

Tags: TODO

The goal is to destroy all circles with your squares.

• Click on a square to split it into 9 smaller squares.
• Drag a square to shoot it

Rewriting the great SquareCity with GameJs so we can play it on the web (and iPad).

• Play Evil Circles

Level Editor Help

Click on the map while holding down a key to create objects:

• w wall
• c circle
• 1,2,3 to create squares

Use the Load and Save buttons below the game to set or get the current map in text form (easy to copy & paste on the internet).

To enable god mode add “,god” to the URL:http://apps.gamejs.org/evilcircles/latest#0,god

SquareCity

Petras Zdanavius created the graphics & game mechanics for PyWeek12 http://pyweek.org/e/petraszd-pw-12/ and won a solid second place!

Additional Art

• break, crunch impacts http://opengameart.org/content/5-break-crunch-impacts
• glass house 1 wavhttp://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=34201
• A more dramatic glass crashhttp://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=34202
• cat eyes http://opengameart.org/content/tilling-cat-eyes
• game over sound, http://pyweek.org/e/multifac/
• tension.wav, http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=30306

Check it out: deadweight music.

Got the first 2 tutorial levels working 😀 Now onto more levels! You can play what I’ve got so far here. (the thing it loads to is a level select screen)

Or a screen that pretty much sums up the game:

Stegosauruses are evil!

Dangerous Dan has been released. Go play it.

We were delighted to find out today that our updated LD19 Jam game, The Wager was named Freeware Game Pick on indiegamer.com yesterday:

http://indiegames.com/2011/05/freeware_game_pick_the_wager_surprised_man.html

What a great boost to our morale as we continue working on LD20. 😀

Anyway, work is progressing nicely on Avarice, but we still have a ton of stuff to do before it’s a proper game. At the moment we’re figuring out an inventory system and starting to set up the economy that’ll drive the gameplay. It’s taken so long to get this far because in our game there are a lot of automated processes happening in the background (in this case, guys wandering around a dungeon, finding treasure and picking fights) that we needed to be functional first, but aren’t directly controlled by the player.

Now we’re onto the stuff that the player does interact with, which involves deciding what items to sell the adventurers and what to buy from various suppliers, in order to get the best reputation and attract richer, higher level customers.

There’s now no real chance of anything complete enough to submit. But here’s a screenshot of how it looks now:

Also:

Might have it done for the Jam! If I’m not in a coma anyway.

Despite being quite disappointed making less progress than usual, I’ve had a good time and met some really cool people this Ludum Dare, so I’m still quite happy overall!

Entry

Tags: final, towlr

8 hours to go and I feel like the game is finally shaping up into something.

I’ve started to draw some sprites and add effects to the game. Not sure about my falling-cubes waterfall effect, but maybe it does the job. Let me know in the comments if it evokes “waterfall” or is completely baffling.

Things that remain to do:

1. Sound effects
2. Player and survivor sprites
3. MORE LEVELS

My entry has already been submitted, but I wanted to share the photo anyway. Oyakodon:

Tags: foodphoto

Pictured: HUD which could do with some refinement, enemies which could do with some refinement, and two boxes that still don't look like robots

It’s almost feature complete, code-wise. All I have left to do is add in the ability to have intro and outro cutscenes (shouldn’t be _too_ hard) and in-game text triggers. Then I just have to design the one giant level this game takes place in, draw all the art, and do some sounds. I might even have enough time for music.

I’m awake! Ugh.. sort-of. I’ve got to do the main game logic today and part of my brain is telling me REWRITE THIS CLEANER but I don’t have time for fancy smancy stuff when it’s sphagetti code go-to time!

A work in progress. Let me know what you think! (the last 1/4 just loops back to the beginning, the real thing wont be like that)

Man the time is just slipping away though…

http://www.filedropper.com/untitled1_7

Now the inventory is fully coded.

You can pick up usable (U) misc items that change your stats. Once used, it disappears from the inventory. Actually, the “Cold Drink” gives the player 5HP and 1ST (Strength). They are of course included in the random item generation.

One little feature more, dropping. When going into the inventory, you can drop (D) an item if you aren’t standing on an item. Useful if the player starts overflowing with items (not probable but still useful get rid of unwanted gear). Dropping creates the item dropped and removes it from the inventory.

Now to do… Mobs. I’ll really cut this to the minimum.

Here are TWO screens :

Yum, cold drink

Don't throw litter in the grotto

I was hoping that the time I spent making a solid engine would help make things go quickly today, but that hasn’t been the case. Everything I’ve tried to do has taken much longer than I’d like. I was hoping to have the first section of the game finished by now, but I haven’t even finished the first room!

That said, hopefully I can get something I like together. It’d be really nice to finish at least a little bit of what I planned!

I had precious little time to spend on my game this weekend.  I needed to be at my work late Friday then most of Saturday and today.  However, I’m not one to back down from a challenge and somehow I was miraculously able to cobble together an LD game in about 10 hours.  It’s called “Light The Way”.  The concept is that if it’s dangerous to go alone, get someone to help you.  I think I’m going to have to call it finished since I will probably not get any more time to work on it today but if I’m super lucky I might get a few extra minutes later tonight.

Link to my entry “Light The Way”

It might not look fancy but it functions and plays pretty nicely.

All the major game logic is in and the main game states;

• Start Screen
• Sample level
• Time over screen
• Death screen
• Success screen

Even though there is 8 hours remaining, i’ll probably only be able to spend another 4 on this. In that time, i’m going to focus on presentation side. Audio, animation and graphics polish.

This has been tough… but fun.

So I tried to add a first-person mode. It’s cool as hell but still pretty buggy and there’s still tons of gameplay left to do, so I’m going to drop it, but leave it in as an option (press F). In the original plan, the overworld was going to be first person and the caves and dungeons would be overhead.

And now, here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. The obligatory sword cave:

I still have a ton of code left — you can’t actually use the sword yet for example. And more map rooms. I’m not sure if it will be quite finished by the deadline but we’ll see how far I can get.

These voxels are pretty fun, tho.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2011 at 4:04 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

Shiny particles. I’ve finally nailed the gameplay mechanics, and the game is finishable logically. The two lines drawn here links to the other two cars, and show the status of your connection with your opponents. When you are too far from your opponents, you start to loose health. I will start to work on glue between levels and see if I can cook up a few more levels.

I’ve got animation, much of my engine together, and a few map screens already! I have a few more gameplay mechanics to implement, and collision, and a TON more map screens to make, but I’m entering the home stretch. This is awesome! I’m going to FINISH!

Lessons for the future:

• Build the engine beforehand – or at least parts of the engine
• Use a language I know
• Have more snacks on hand!

Here we go! Good luck to everybody still working!

Deadline is too near. School tomorrow. No time. Portal 2

Anyway here are 2 screenshots from my game

Old man wants his book. I found it! :D

How nice! He gave me a flashlight! :)

Game already “playable”, looks like this:

Tags: screenshot

I didn’t get started until just a few hours ago, as I was pretty busy on Saturday. With only 8 hours left I really don’t have too much to show for it and practically no gameplay. I’m hoping that by the time this is done it will be at least playable, but we’ll see I guess.

You can check out what I have here.
Edot: whoops, misspelled emergency. My bad 😛

I’m really tired, so I’m admitting this is a jam game, if even, and calling it a night. If you can call it that; it’s after 2pm.

I can’t say I’m impressed with my stamina today. I’ve only been up a little over 21 hours (I haven’t really been sleeping well in general though).

Anyways, here’s another screenshot.

I don’t think I could get everything working before the end of the competition anyways, even if I was well rested.

Here‘s a very incomplete build if you’re curious. Arrows or A and D to move, space to do things. 5-9 when in the starting room do stuff (for debugging purposes).

Goodnight (afternoon?).

Hey everyone. I’m taking about 6 comments to heart that told me to finish this game and I am doing so. I just gotta fix a bug or two and put the final touches in it.

7 Hours to go. Keep your pants on everyone. 😀

I’ve just finished to implemented user interface !

Let’s see what it gives:

I can’t believe it… The game is called Overdead, you may try it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4047

So you ask, why haven’t I updated since Friday? Well, because I’ve made some awesome progress. The storyline is as follows: You are Commander Tirax of Planet Yarynx in the Prolock Galaxy. You have declared war on Venox. You go alone, so the leaders have given you a SMG! So far I have the intro, story, and a stage scrolling map. I just have to make better walking animations, shooting, enemies, and finish up the stage backgrounds. Here are some screenshots. I hope you’re as excited as I am. 😉

At first i was like

but then i was like

Another Demo for you guys (and girls)

It has two levels now, and background music (I decided to delay graphics refinement cause I’m not very good at it, so there would not be much improvement), unfortunately, you can’t turn of the music yet, but that is to be added till submit, along with sound effects.

Click Image to play

lol…

well, I’ve managed to finish an LD20 entry! woohoo!
Of course, I would have liked to expand on it…

Afraid I can’t blog and thrash code at the same time – it hurts my head…
a post-binary-bender-blog will come later,

well done ludites!
look forward to checking out the games!
cheers,

Okay, I can’t work on my entry much more so I’m submitting what I have done. Here’s the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4350

A lot of things I tried didn’t really work out but I’ve learned a lot about what you can actually get done in 2 days, so I’ll be more preprepared next time. Anyway, let me know what you think!

Like usual, I’m recording some totals. The number of entries submitted by specific times as we approach the deadline. So far we have: The results are:

210 Minutes (+3:30): 75 Entries
120 Minutes (+2:00): 103 Entries (+28 in 90 Minutes)
105 Minutes (+1:45): 108 Entries (+5 in 15 Minutes)
90 Minutes (+1:30): 113 Entries (+5 in 15 Minutes)
75 Minutes (+1:15): 123 Entries (+10 in 15 Minutes)
60 Minutes (+1:00): 130 Entries (+7 in 15 Minutes)
50 Minutes (+0:50): 132 Entries (+2 in 10 Minutes)
40 Minutes (+0:40): 140 Entries (+8 in 10 Minutes)
30 Minutes (+0:30): 149 Entries (+9 in 10 Minutes)
20 Minutes (+0:20): 156 Entries (+7 in 10 Minutes)
15 Minutes (+0:15): 164 Entries (+8 in 5 Minutes)
10 Minutes (+0:10): 174 Entries (+10 in 5 Minutes)
5 Minutes (+0:05): 187 Entries (+13 in 5 Minutes)
3 Minutes (+0:03): 192 Entries (+5 in 2 Minutes)
2 Minutes (+0:02): 199 Entries (+7 in 1 Minute)
0 Minutes (+0:00): 204 Entries (+5 in 2 Minutes)
-1 Minutes (-0:01): 212 Entries (+8 in 1 Minute)
-2 Minutes (-0:02): 217 Entries (+5 in 1 Minute)
INTERNET OUTAGE! YARG!
-7 Minutes (-0:07): 224 Entries (+7 in 5 Minutes)
-10 Minutes(-0:10): 230 Entries (+6 in 3 Minutes)
-15 Minutes(-0:15): 243 Entries (+13 in 5 Minutes)
-20 Minutes(-0:20): 252 Entries (+9 in 5 Minutes)
-25 Minutes(-0:25): 258 Entries (+6 in 5 Minutes)
-30 Minutes(-0:30): 261 Entries (+3 in 5 Minutes)
-35 Minutes(-0:35): 265 Entries (+4 in 5 Minutes)
-40 Minutes(-0:40): 270 Entries (+5 in 5 Minutes)
-45 Minutes(-0:45): 279 Entries (+9 in 5 Minutes)
-50 Minutes(-0:50): 283 Entries (+4 in 5 Minutes)
-55 Minutes(-0:55): 287 Entries (+4 in 5 Minutes)
-60 Minutes(-1:00): 293 Entries (+6 in 5 Minutes)
-65 Minutes(-1:05): 296 Entries (+3 in 5 Minutes)

I will continue to update this post as it happens. Done. Jam time.

REMEMBER: We accept compo entries for one hour after the deadline (the clock will say “submission hour”). Once that expires, it’s Jam entries only. Good luck!

I’m getting a bunch done. A lot of the things I had to do are finished. Right Now I’m up to making Ganon. This is gonna be the hard part.

Oh, and I came up with a name for my game:

The Legend of Zelda
–on Budget Cuts–

—
Mikhail Rudoy

I am gonna make it!~!

Here is a screenshot of the first level I completed.

Unfortunately I have no chances of completing my game or even the engine in time, due to lack of knowledge in AS3 and Flashpunk library. I’ll practice those, so that in next LD, I’ll be sure to complete!

Good luck everybody! :3
-kAle

Only 6 hours left and I’ve really had to start cutting corners … recovering from my late start and a game concept that required a lot more work then i anticipated oh well I can always touch it up for the jam version (which I’ll have some external help with sound wise)

…because the left lens of my glasses popped out! I am going to need to get my frames replaced, this has happened like 14 times.

Also, tightening screws while blind is no fun.

So, my last available hours lie in front of me… Indeed, I have to get up at 6AM so I can’t really go until the 4AM end period.

Found a hidden bug in the item & monster spawner : it spawned only on the top zone of the world because i iterated a var and checked another. That done, it looks better (screen below).

To do :

*Mob/mob & player/mob collision

*Mob action (move;attack)

*User attack

*Start screen & end screen

*Implement a maximum of items & redo graphics

Here’s the screenie :

Green dots are goblins; let our blade taste blood !

…not nearly enough time to do everything I still wanted, as usual!

Anyway, got loads of stuff done (including time manipulation stuff)… I even implemented a portal system using only the scripting engine I built in the game! Of course, this kind of stuff costs time, so I’m guessing that I need to be better at doing it, or preroll it as part of my framework, need to think about that…

Anyway, got some ideas on how to make the game over, main menu, etc, while saving some time, so I don’t have much stuff to do, although it’s stuff that takes some time:

• Framework working
• Loading a level data (from a DDS image)
• Rendering the level (3d generated from the level data)
• Drawing the character
• Rendering character
• Design levels/items so I know what to implement
• Spawn points
• Bind spawn points to scripting events
• Draw “old man” and do speech system (seems like a polish thing, but it’s kind of important…)
• Give and take objects to the player (through scripting)
• Spawn creatures and give them rudimentary AI (also through scripts)
• Draw and animate imps
• Wand of Unsummoning
• End of level (portal thing)
• Main menu
• Title screen
• Game over screen (?)
• Sound
• Music
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Level 4
• Level 5
• Load/Save
• ….

Hey I’m Man of Doom. I went out for a few drinks as it’s a bank holiday weekend here, but it’s okay because I’m certain I can get everything working before midnight and release a delicious game about strangling people with posessed socks.

As I can see my game is not leading any where. It’s even not in the theme D:
So here is what I got so far.

See you next ludum dare!
And good luck too everyone who is still making their games, some of them just awesome!

Six hours left and I’ve got about half the level design done. I also fixed every bug I know about, but I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. Here’s a playable build:

Download Demo (Windows)

Let me know what you think! Also, let me know if something doesn’t work.

Yay, finished, uploaded and submitted my entry.

It’s a rather unoriginal Zelda clone with a few weapons to find. Play with cursor keys, Z/Y to toggle weapons (once acquired) and control to attack. I even managed to cram an end screen in there.

This is my first entry created with VS 2008, so I’m not entirely sure about the required runtimes, since you can’t place the DLLs alongside anymore. If anybody runs into trouble starting it let me know please!

Get the game here: Clicky

Awesome afternoon, awesome progress. I’m just starting to write the game loop but the game is online at Trollbridge-Armours.ananasblau.com and you can take a snoop around the shop. My test suite sums up to 68 specs by now. Not that anyone cares…

Tags: trollbridge armours

Song of Adventure Day is complete… or the one level compo entry is complete. And I’m uploading music that was made for but not used in the game.

Doodley Dude is the actual game track, though not the waveform seen as the game’s city backdrop.

That backdrop is actually Paladin Drone (I had a sub-theme in my mind of palindromes.)

Alone is a creeping version of the first, a trick I use way too much.

These aren’t arranged yet but I’m giddy from lack of oxyg… sleep. Sleep.

After a 6 hour trip to Vienna i found some inspiration look at aliens with penises and tits. I have super awesome ideas, 12 levels planned and i implemented the core game mechanics in the last 40 minutes! Everything went better than expected.

I’m in. I can do this! 6:25h are enough for anyone!

Latest runnable: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/cubocy.jar

w,a,s,d -> control Bob or cube
e -> switch control to cube. After you moved it pressed e again to fix it for 5 minutes. During that time you can jump on it with Bob.

Got most of my main menu finished, the game engine is complete, 3/6 baddies, 1/6 levels, music but not sound, and my intro cutscene.

Still left to do, more main menuing, more baddies MOAR GUNS!, more levels, sound, and that’s it!

*gulp*

Here goes…

Yeaaah! 😀

A good game this time, you can find it here

Tomorrow a good postmortem, now go to bed and wait to play another entries.. thanks to all 😀 Pretty fun read everyone thoughts 😀

It’s my first Ludum Dare, and I’ve made some rookie mistakes, and now I’m behind! Oh well =)  Not much of a game at this point. Here’s what it looks like:

Yep, I was quite productive but still I had to cut few features off and I’m afraid that game won’t be as fun as I thought at the start. I have to work on the main menu now and dialogs in game which is the most boring part for me. I have roughly 6 hours left and I’m tired to death but I’ll make it yep!

as simple as it can get in that time

few toasts to fill my stomach emptiness until the end

Tags: foodshot, screenshot menu

The game is now very close to completion. There’s 20 levels in total, and nineteen in this demo. The boss is not included.

http://www.mediafire.com/?xjv4vyzpcta17k1

 Checklist
 - Retouch all 20 levels' backgrounds
 - Make a boss
 - Menu stuff, and pause screen stuff: end game / skip level
 - Saving progress
 - More sound effects, background music 

…explosive cat.

Angry cat was not having a good day.

Everyone knows cats are explosive, right?

I’ve made a bit more progress:  I can shoot now!  And the shots will collide with things and react accordingly!  Now to add some things for them to collide with, eh?

LD #20 Demo2

Tags: LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, pygame, python, video

still…need..to…make…more…levels

should have made more elements. being creative is hard with limited objects o.O

Ostensibly, the game is finished. With just a single hour, I could rush something off and just scrape entering the compo. But I need actual proper art assets.

For this very reason.

But the dialogue thing is done.

As can be seen here.

All that’s left now is the creative side of thing. All of the bits and pieces are there. I just need to assemble and paint them. And… stick a squeaky toy squeaker in them. And a music box. Okay, this analogy has worn out its usefulness. BACK TO WORK!

I’ve made a fair bit of progress on day 2, but I have a lot of work to squeeze into the next few hours to get something playable together.

I’ve done a cheap and cheerful intro sequence though, and here’s a screen from it:

I’m current racking my brains trying to come up with a way I can alter my game to make it more of a challenge, while at the same time trying to finish off bits that are required just for it to work properly.

Anyway, I should get back to work!

Tags: dangerous to go alone, intro, progress, screenshot

So, we started working as soon as we matured the idea enough. Our progress so far:
This is our Map Editor (if it becomes something more polished to the end of the Jam, we are totally uploading it for other compos) and our current test setup for the game. We finally switched from Java to C++ (using Allegro) since we failed to find a Java framework with the features we wanted.

We have uploaded some pics of our development lair to flickr. Be sure to check them out.

In the morning I’ll do a title screen and some more enemies if I have the time (and maybe readdress the player’s movement now that I have mouse editing, which I’m probably going to keep). But for now I’m pretty tired. Check out this WIP build if you want (and make some screens, if you want!):

http://klikscene.com/flash/ld20.html

Summary: it’s LoZ, but everybody can edit the world.

So here we are. Six hours to finish the game, and still a long way to go. I wasted a lot of time today. But I still hope I’m going to release game. Yeah. For Great Justice!

Here are some new features:

• Poor fellows can now die, should they wander too far away from the others. As you can see on the screenshot, they leave a nice puddle of blood.
• Player can click mouse on the dark areas to make *very scary* monster (see on the left) appear for half a second. Monster is supposed to scare people away, but right now, it doesn’t.
• There’s dynamic lighting! 😀 Well, not really smooth, but it’s there and serves two functions: restrict monster spawn areas and give player a hint as to how far away should the human go to become suitable prey.
• Humans now try to stick together and don’t bump into walls (they didn’t enter the walls in previous version too, but now they don’t even *try*).
• Oh, and they are now moving smoothly. Physics is tile-based, however.

All is not so bright though. After losing a lot of time on “humans-stick-together-but-try-to-explore” thing, I failed miserably. Most of them just stick around the spawn point. Those who try to explore used to get to the other end of the map, given about half an hour, but now they don’t — they just die.

Also, surprisingly, I ran into severe performance problems when I tried using alpha-channel for lighting. Seems like Qt is horrendously slow when drawing software graphics. My first impulse was to use its OpenGL facilities, but it turns out to be more complicated than originally anticipated. Maybe it’s just me. But my solution for the problem was to resign alpha channel altogether and use sprite with every other pixel being black and every other transparent. Smooth lighting going down the drain.

Oh, and the Scrollbars. That’s just plain wrong.

Here’s my todo list for remaining hours:

1. Exits for the map and some simple pathfinding. I know how to do it and it seems to be easy — provided that there’s always one destination. For all mobs. I’m just tired of watching them dance around in the spawn room. Randomness will stay, though.
2. Let humans be actually scared of monsters. The good part: this will finally turn it into the game. The bad part: I don’t even know if it will be any fun. I doubt, however, that it will be challenging at all. Maybe if I limit player’s ability to spawn monsters and make humans to to the exit fast enough and stick together well…
3. Scores for killing every human. Preferably, combos too.
4. Sound effects. Because recording screams is faster than drawing death animations.
5. And some sort of GUI + short tutorial (just to show a few messages on screen).

Hm, on the second thought, how am I going to accomplish it in the time left? Will I have to settle for jam? I hope not.

I’ve got most of the code finished for the new gameplay direction. Haskell really shines through as an awesome language for gameplay programming. I was really stumbling over the tile engine stuff, but now that that’s over and my scope is reduced, I think I might actually finish this thing. I have tons of polish-type work to do, but I’m hopeful now. The game’s actually kind of fun, even though it looks like crap.

What’s left, roughly in priority:

• re-work the intro cinematics to fit the new game story, along with a description of how to play
• make real graphics for the king, the enemies, the crown, and the castle
• add sound to the gameplay
• fix the map so it’s more interesting
• make music for the gameplay
• add more object types
• make graphics for the cinematics
• make more levels with increasing difficulty
• make new cinematics to tie the additional levels together

Gameplay and graphics are pretty much finished now. Next up: music and sound. And if there is time; online highscores.

So I think my program now deservers to be called a game.

There are now enemies, levels, health, a score and you can win and loose.

Well, there is actually just one level and just one kind of enemy so far, and the level is not final or anything, but it can no be properly played. Wohoo!

So since it is already playable now I’m pretty sure I’ll have something playable for this LD.

So long,

Mr. Wonko

I will do a proper wrap / post mortem later, just posting to say OMG I FINISHED SOMETHING.

Now to switch computer off.

Good luck in the last bit of crunch time all!!! I don’t know who you are but I am exciting to play your game.

Ahhh the home stretch! Still need to add more weapons, a new zombie type or two, add better AI, and make the game challenging.  Here’s the game in it’s current state, right now death is turned off since I need to do the title/score screens as well: http://roachpuppy.com/ld48-20/

Oh! And I still need a title for this game… Post your suggestions in the comments!

This is how my level selection will look like – if doors are closed, you can’t eneter that map otherwise you can. And there will be player’s image infront of the crypt that is currently selected, others will be dark / half invisible.

Tags: level selection

It’s now 6:18am and I need to be at work at 9am. Ergghhh.

Check out http://manypixies.com (in Chrome)

Submission Page

My god I’ve actually finished it. This was my first Ludum Dare and I honestly never thought I would ever come CLOSE to cranking out a entry, I have very very very FEW finished projects, so to have one that I made within 48 hours is thrilling and will definitely give me a Confidence Boost to future projects. I was intimidated the whole way through and I am just glad I stuck with it. So try it out, let me know what you think, and when the time comes, give it an honest vote! This competition was amazing fun and I can’t wait to see what games are submitted! I find it absolutely hilarious how far I strayed from my original idea, check out my journal to see what I mean by that after giving it a playthrough 😀

Unfortunately, at this point, I don’t think I’ll have time to add audio. I do hope that the interface is intuitive enough to let people not fail at even playing. I mean, I just need them to read one sentence, and they should get it – but knowing how people play games, this might be too much! Also, I removed 2 more major bugs from the movement  code.

Well, at least I’ve left myself loads of room for improvement next time (because I’m definitely coming back for LD #21).

Hey everybody,

I’ve never done this before and I’ve been so focused on putting my time into the game that I haven’t posted anything about it here.  Sure the competition is almost done, but I still have time for a little preview for you guys First a screenshot of what the basic game screen looks like at the start of a level:

"It is Dangerous to go Alone in the Dark"

Yup, that’s what it looks like.  Nope, you don’t play as a sentient ball of light.  I had a couple ideas to start with.  For a while, I was thinking of doing a sort of story-based game about going away by yourself to college or moving to a new city or whatever, but then I realized I wanted something with a little more gameplay.  The first thing that popped into my head was that exploring a dark cave by yourself was pretty dangerous.  I wanted to do something interesting with that though, so I decided that I should emphasize sound instead of visuals.  Therefore, the ‘this’ you take is a sonar monster detector.  The closer you are to an enemy, the faster it beeps.  Using this as well as a limited number of flares per level that you can place where you think enemies are, you must make your way through a series of caves with randomly placed, ever-increasing amounts of monsters.

Basically, think of it as minesweeper where you control an actual character instead of a mouse cursor, and where sound is your primary form of information on where the ‘mines’ are.

At this point, all the gameplay stuff is done.  I suppose I should give it another test runthrough or two, but we’ll see if I have time.  At this point, I’m just working on polish and adding assets.  More animations, sound, music, and plot-type-stuff.

This has certainly been an eye opening experience (I guess that’s kind of a pun, you’ll see what I mean when you play) and I’ve learned a lot from it.  It will also be the first game I’ve actually fully finished and released to the public, so that’s awesome!  Anyway, I hope you guys like it/at least think the idea is interesting.  Sorry for not posting more as I went about the process!

-Tim ‘fueelin’ Beck

Ok. I have 4 levels…

And 5 and a half hours left.

The last level took me an hour… Hmm, let’s try for 10 levels 😀

Although I still do need to do a title screen and a bit of bug fixing

I think music is out of the question by now too. D:

Blah

I ran out of time.. I got this far. Most of the time was spent of tile map, input, drawing etc. Next time I will start with an actual engine, not just with a bunch classes for drawing stuff 😀

Ok, i almost done…almost.

Good news – i have synthesised robotic voice for hero’s space boat!  Boat have superior artificial intellect. She will talk to hero and give directions.

By the way, at this site you can freely generate some voices with effects http://www.cepstral.com/demos/

Currently uploading short gameplay video, introducing first enemies and weapons. Fraps made me 1.5GB, dunno if i successfully upload this.

And, finally, there is screenshot of title screen, showing place where the game starts.

Yeah I have no idea what the black stuff is either. I don’t even know what this place is. It has tiled walls and metal floors. Maybe it’s a hospital or something. Could be a swimming pool for all I know.

Are the floors broken, or is this some sort of bizarro staircase? And why are there two rooms full of spikes on the bottom floor? These are questions that I have about 5 hours left to answer.

There’s really nothing new to show on the screenshots. The devil’s in the details.

Uploaded the demo (so far) here: http://www.j-space.dk/ld20/index.html

It’s a mess compared to many of the other things I’ve seen displayed on the site, but I’m proud of the amount of stuff I’ve produced on my own throughout the weekend. I’ve decided to purchase a drawing tablet for the next compo and practice drawing – I also plan to secure the services (well, availability) of a friend’s recording studio so I can make cleaner sounds.

Criticism is welcome, but will be promptly ignored 😛

This otter is as happy as I am. Almost.

My entry, A Colorful Man, has been submitted!

It is cheesy and wonderful and I am so glad that it isn’t terrible.

I hope!

Wow, time flies.

There’s still a lot left for me to do but I’ll see if I can submit something into the 48 hour competition. I mean, I’ve made it this far.

I’ve been fighting with sound and py2exe for the last bit. I have a preview up so far with some roaming enemies and you can walk around and fight. You start the game with 8 pieces of bread. Hurray!

I tried to test this on a WinXP virtual machine. You need Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtimes to run the exe, otherwise you’ll get an error. However, I couldn’t seem to click on anything in the main menu, but it worked fine on my Windows 7 machine.

We’ll see what happens I guess :s

Download link can be found here – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27865321/adventures_of_adam_we.zip

After taking a break for food and non-screen time, it’s time for the last burst of activity. Tect-wise I’m almost done, things to do:

• Expand NPC conversation options
• Add win condition and success screen
• Design world
• Package up for other computers
• Add sounds
• Add room props
• Still missing one enemy type (may be dropped)
• Music?
• Particle effects
• Polish graphics

Yeah, that’s a pretty big list still. In particular ‘design world’ means designing and testing all the rooms and puzzles and making sure they fit together nicely.

Onwards!

This marks the third LD48 that I’ve failed to finish. Feels bad, man.

If you want to play what I did finish, you can check it out here.

Good luck everyone.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2011 at 6:53 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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 am nearly done, but with only 3 hours left, it could be a close one.

I just finished adding a vine climbing mechanic that is working pretty well.

Now I need to hunker down in level-editing mode to get this game done.

…since I spent a great part of my saturday being ill. Too much junk brain food kills the brain, I guess. In my postmortem, I will note that : only vegetables and real fruits allowed.

Anyway, I’m almost done, and with a few more hours to finish graphics and fix some strange epicyclic bugs, I will submit a nice little jam entry tomorrow. Now, time to sleep.

It is fun to write help content.

I got into a big nice slump a few hours ago, too tired to do anything real productive and useful. So I quit coding/graphics whatever I was doing and I trained a bit, stretched and doing some limbering up in front of Idra vs Select. Damn Idra played well despite his rage quits. Thereafter I went to the shower and now I’m back and now I’m ready to go.

I’ve got most of the functionality done, I think, and the graphics looks fairly okay. But the game isn’t fun and the sounds are awful and I’ve got a lot to do. But it’s crunch time now baby.

5 hours to go and I’m up to prototype 4 of Waterfall Rescue:

UPDATE: Forgot to include the link, now it should work.

Click the image to play this prototype

I’ve added sound effects, and done some work on the swing. I widened the arc for it, and added easing into the tops of the swing, which will hopefully make it easier and more natural-feeling. This played a little bit of havoc with my already spotty physics on the survivors hanging off of you, but in a 48-hour game you need to focus on gameplay first and damn the consequences. Hopefully the benefit this has to the feel of the swinging will outweigh the physics weirdness introduced.

What do you think? Any and all feedback between now and 9 PM tonight would be highly appreciated!

Todo list:

1. Sound effects
2. Character art
3. MORE LEVELS