Not very much, just a board of rubbish ideas:

I think I’m going to run with this idea. Some random ideas in no order:

• Opening sequence where a bored king on a throne gets awarded a peasant by an old man hoisting him over his head.
• Bored king sits on his throne and is not controllable. You control the peasant.
• You lose if the king dies.
• At first your main concern is getting food for the king. You have to hunt an animal, kill it, and use it with the fire to create food.
• Note sure how the food should be consumed or tracked… in a store room?
• You can chop down some trees to get seeds that you can plant. The planted seeds will grow into plants that you can chop down and feed the king with.
• Sometimes a bear will wander into camp and steal food. If you get near it’ll swipe at you. If you get hit it stuns you for a bit. Not sure if you should be able to die.
• You can use wood to create walls that a bear can’t get through without hacking at them for a bit, but neither can you.
• Every once and a while, a new peasant will come by to help out. They have specific talents (hunter, farmer, miner, warrior, carpenter/lumberjack, stonemason, blacksmith, etc). At first you just get farmers & hunters. If you accept their help they use your food but do farming or hunting for you.
• Eventually the king demands gold (or steel? metal? i dunno). You can mine for this and stockpile it similar to food.
• Maybe you also have to get metal and wood and stone?
• Once you have some gold/metal, you will get attacked  by human raiders. More dangerous than bears!
• If you enclose the king, he says something like “Yes, finally a manor fit for a king!”
• Perhaps the king gives you a bunch of achievements/quests to drive gameplay forward. Once you complete them all you winz.
• The carpenter/lumberjack will chop down trees and create wood that you can use to make walls.
• The stonemason crushes rocks into stone that you can use to create much more effective walls.
• Gold sometimes drops when you kill a rock; most of the time you just get stone or metal.
• The blacksmith will turn metal into weapons. More effective weapons make the warriors fight better.

Just broke 125 lines with 0 hours sleep yestersday and prepped to leave on paris trip, I now have: TileD maps loading 100% loading done and rendering done onto my screen, Nice along with the start of a game map file under way (super nice

Story is something like this: You are an apprentice but somehow something happens to your mentor dude and you are being chased by bad guys that blow up the wrong persons house a few times. Luckily your mentor dude is alive and so are you. So he sends you ‘the key to the world’ – what shall it be? Because that package is pretty damn light!

Stay tuned! For the fate of the world! Game name? Nothing so far! C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGH!

Say, there’s a team of researchers / soldiers / civilians struggling around in the darkness. There’s something lurking in the dark, and while it is reluctant to approach armed-to-the-teeth humans in full light, still if it ever catches someone alone and separated from the group, it’s curtains. Two people can survive, but one always gets killed. Humans desperately need to get to safety, to light, while monsters are hungry: they want to eat them all.

Now the best part: you’re on the side of monsters. You can pop out of the shadows briefly, make strange sounds or make subtle alterations to the level, like suddenly turning on the lights. Doing this, you compel them to investigate or scare them away, with the ultimate goal of having at least some of them walk alone. And then you eat them, scared and broken 😀

So, that’s my best bet for now. Maybe sounds a bit too epic, but this is it for now. I’ll go get some sleep.

Tags: idea

Hallo again!

Some of you may remember my Infinite space discovery game for LD 19.  You may also remember that it didnt go very well.  BUT! That was LD19.  This time around, I’m doing something different.

We are going to be eating the hopes and dreams of disabled orphans.  With this guy:

I’m making a platformer where this guy (Reginald), gets a cannon strapped to his back (it’s dangerous to go alone…) and is sent into the dreams of sleeping orphans.  His goal is simple…Eat.  Using the cannon, he will fight Dinosaurs and eat the sweet tasty hopes inside of dreams.

The twist, the cannon will shoot a random weapon.  I’m going to create a bunch of weapons and give you a random one at the beginning of each level.

~Kylegar

Yesterday I was thinking of potential game ideas for every item on the final voting list. “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!” happens to be one of three that I came up with absolutely nothing before. Guess that serves me right for trying to jump the gun (not that I consider coming up with an idea early cheating 😛 it’s just an idea, and they’re a dime a dozen).

So this one has really taken me off-guard for my first Ludum Dare :/

Nevertheless after a half-hour of pacing my parents’ kitchen I’ve gawt one [that I like of three]! But it’s fairly shapeless with a parallel battle mechanic… so I’m  thumbing through Jesse Schell’s”Deck of Lens”  and hoping it’s possible to do this in two days. The closest comp to LD that I’ve ever entered was 5 days, and I thought my eyes were going to hemorrhage and my brain was going to melt. Fortunately neither of those happened so today/tonight I’m joining you hardcore code killahs.

I know you’re jealous of this title screen. I’m sorry you can’t do better.

Huzzah! I’ve got the mapping system up and running!

I’ve decided to do a 3rd person shooter. I’ve always avoided programming in the genre because I could never find a robust way to do mapping and levels… well here ya go 😛

Ok, having chosen my idea, I have descended into my game development bunker with enough liquor to last .. umm .. 2 days I’m thinking. I shall not emerge until the game has been completed or the beer runs dry. The location of the bunker is impossible to trace, so don’t even try finding it. Even this post could just be a plot to throw you off course.

I won’t say too much about the details about my game, because many simply don’t exist just yet. But I can tell you this much, I need to develop some flea AI. Luckily I’ve watched enough cartoons involving flea circuses, and have a good idea of what they should act like.

The bunker artwork has eaten up 15 minutes of my time, but it’s like warming up and stretching before you play basketball… It’s necessary to avoid pulling a hammy. Now it’s time to step inside the mind of a flea and become a flea.see you on the other side…

Treating each game like it's the end of the world

Well, only an hour and a half in, and I’ve already scrapped my first idea. Decided that I don’t think I could come up with enough unique ideas for a puzzle game in a short period of time… Goodbye my blocks…

Next up… Something else with blocks. 😀 I’m afraid I’m going to spend the entire first 24 hours scrapping ideas partway through that I won’t get anything done.

A very broad theme, but workable

You play a shop keeper who specializes in equipment and items for adventurers. Your goal is to speak to your patrons and convince them they need a item. Whenever you speak to a adventurer, you can select the kind of conversation you want to have and then fill the spaces using a list of verbs.  Depending on if you made a sale or not you gain points based on how far a leap you made (Like getting a warrior to buy a staff) and how well you catered to their traits (possibly randomly generated?). Points can be used to buy enhancements (like shopping music, a larger vocabulary, etc).

Gonna start making a quick and dirty prototype after a snack run!

Take this, take this, take this!

I’ve been thinking about how to develop based on this theme and have some ideas, but I’m not sure how things would unfold. I have some humour and a rough idea for a story. Two brothers taking on the world? Hmm, maybe.

I didn’t spend too much time looking at the themes when voting but I came up with an awesome idea for evolution, that could also ride off of the theme for this contest. An item that evolves based on your playstyle and battles? That would be kinda neat, but it touches more on evolution than “Here, take this”.

I really want to go in the direction of overhead view adventure/rpg… but I’m not sure if time will really allow for it. My programmer art skills are limited to say the least, and then there’s filling out a story and some dialog. Time to ponder some more.

Ok, so the name might change but I finally decided on a concept!

Take the role of a shop keeper and supply adventurers with items. Craft items from resources. Get resources from returning adventurers or buy them from traveling salesmen. Adventurers try to defeat an evil empire and you can see the progress as they move towards their goal. If they survive a fight they come back to purchase more things and hand over any goodies found. Repeat until one side wins!

Take This!

Cake Mania meets Minecraft meets Pianola!

I used a quite basic but efficient “minecraft” style generation (sedimentary ?) :

Works pretty good for the global map. Now I shall zoom in and generate details for the player to explore

I broke my own rule and set a pretty damn big scope for myself…I really do hope I finish. I really shouldn’t go for this but what the hell. Faith and caffeine might make this possible. Ill provide some more insight soon. Good luck all!

It’s 5:35 am now and I got a little hungry. Now that is what i’m talking about. Yummy, delish and filled with veggies and wonder. Yum yum

Yummy

Well, I figure I’ve at least got a good idea going. So far it involves kittens, pig men, and a monster truck. Now if I can get my physics happening fairly soon I may be on the road to having a decent entry! This was actually the theme I was hoping for in particular so maybe luck is on my side!

Hope everyone else out there’s got a good start!

All I have is this tittle screen and a script for the comic that opens the game.

“It’s dangerous to go alone” — Sure, why not have a game in which there are two characters working as a team? You can only control one and the other is a computer-controlled character who obeys “STOP” and “COME TO ME” commands.

“Take THIS!” — On its own, this makes me think about attacking. As in, someone’s about to punch you. I’m leaning more towards environmental hazards that occur if your partner gets too far away from you. Something silly and comical that makes no sense otherwise, maybe — something like a weight falling on your head. Like after a time limit or something.

Trying to combine the two I think of something where you have a partner that follows you closely. Upon reaching certain obstacles, however, there’s a timing element to get past (like pistons that can crush you), and you can’t both go because your partner is JUST slow enough to get crushed when you avoid it. So you have to let him stay in one spot, and then a time limit starts. Gotta get past the trap or else that weight will fall on you and so you’ve lost a life. Once you’ve gotten past, your partner teleports a few behind you (so that traps can be chained, leaving space for pausing between obstacles to get timing right), and you’ve both gotten through safely.

Probably won’t be able to get this done in time on account of other commitments. Damned end of the semester deadlines.

So im having a bowl of ceral and pretty soon my favourite game is up shortly might go on it for 20 minutes then back on track on my LD. I might be entering the Jam instead but it depends. The Elders Items is the name of my game. Well the idea is basically getting items from elders that has unique abilities. Not telling you what they are!

– GMD

I’m going to get sleep for an early wake tomarow (gotta take the dog to the vet). I will sleep and when I get back I will vork 3X as hard as I did this night.

I did work on it a little bit: Basically you are a random person thaat finds the grim reaper in the middle of the medo. Hes says what the theme is and disappears. Soon evil things (I don’t know what they will be) will wall from the sky and you have to use the power of the seed’s flower to beat them. Soo the seed will evolv and you came make more flowers, cross breed them, and create super flowers.

Is it a good idea?

Good night,
-pants

All done!!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=4407

…I think. Got a good idea in my head, here are the random scribbles relating to the forming idea:

Hi,
I am doing Ludum Dare. This is what I have so far:

I hope to make a great Ludum Dare game.

So a meme really took it eh?

It’s a nice open ended theme, but I can’t eek out a creative or gimmicky design around it. So as per the usual I think I’ll use the LD as an opportunity to test out some technologies I’ve wanted to play with (Flashpunk and Flint. Also buffering inputs). Going to go with a simple side scrolling feline beat em’ up. Something pretty similar to Dad N’ Me.

A snapshot of my inspiration

Totally a brawler

How do you creative folks manage to knock out non-derivative LD titles anyhow? I need help working my creative muscle.

Tools

• Photoshop and Paint.NET
• sfxr
• Likely some sort of online music generator (http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata possibly)
• Flash CS4
• Flashpunk and Tweener(unless Flashpunk has some built in tweening methods) for my libraries.
• Flash Builder
• Chronolapse – Yay timelapse!

Any suggestions on good sprite sheet / pixel art tools? Should I use Graphics Gale?

Oh, and a parting workspace snapshot:

I had a choice between cleaning my workspace area, and sleeping. Which of the two I chose is self evident.

Tags: delcartion of intent, deskphoto

This isn’t the theme I wanted, I was hoping for Anachronism or Non-Euclidean rhubarb. But a day or two ago I thought of a fun game that I could do based on Take this! It’s dangerous to go alone.

It involves a person going out into the brain eater infested outside, and bringing (or not bringing) their brain. Hmmm….

After every level, It’s Dangerous To Go Alone Take This Physics Breaker.

Since Physics Breaker was /way/ a better theme.

Original idea dump follows.

CAVE JIMMY 2: PHYSICS BREAKER

Platformer where it gives you a random physics breaker from a set, you have to use it to unlock more, various level sets etc. I do have working platformer physics left over from a past LD game.

—————————
Idea #1 —
Conwiz gives you a Conspiracy. You apply it judiciously to NPCs in dialog stuff to persuade them to give you money, etc.

Idea #2 —
YOU ARE ISLAND 2: TAKE THIS
It’s like You Are Island but slightly less crummy, involving real gameplay and not super tons of combos and goofy pixellation – a random bonus item at game start.

I’ve decided I’m going to do it in first-person 3D. I don’t know why I punish myself like that, but hey ho. I was all set to do a 2D old-school game, but then the theme kind of threw me a little.

It’s going to involve the player being stuck in the middle of a forest or something, and there’s going to be zombies. Or ghosts. Not sure.

I think it’s going to involve light as well. The possibility of kittens has not been ruled out.

Okay, I’m in. But I’m hungry. I’m going to make bread.
Messing about with this dough has given me time to  think about the theme and I’ve gone through a couple of ideas before settling on one that’ll be fun to make. It’s a game which relies on online user generated content, so it’s probably going to be a complete clusterfuck, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go (since I’m pretty much a total newb when it comes to database crap, etc.).

My current goal is to get the basic save/load script working before this thing comes out of the oven.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• Main menu for starting a new game or loading a game, possibly for adjusting options
• Pause menu for saving your game and exiting
• “Cinematic” screen for the “here take this!” and possibly other interludes (like YOU WIN or YOU DIE), sometimes with text at the bottom that allows you to say “yes” or “no”
• Randomly generated main play tile area with grass, stone, river, lakes, trees, plants. Should be pretty big. Scrolls as you move around like the SNES zelda
• Tiles can have objects on top of them such as entities or objects
• Entities can carry objects
• Entities can place carried objects on the tile in front of them
• Entities can move in 4 directions and play a simple move animation
• Entities can play other simple animations consisting of a few frames
• A HUD displays resources (plus drains) and the current king’s quest and the day and time of day
• Entities can attack, attacked things get hurt until they die
• Upon death, the entity changes to an object or goes away
• Upon the death of an object, the object can change to one of any random number of things, or can be impervious, or go away, or can change to something that depends on who hit it or what weapon they were using when they hit it
• Entities need behavior tracking (simple state machine prob?), pathing (A* plus steering?)
• Some kind of director to spawn resources and enemies and wild animals and friendlies
• You need a simple set of tools (weapons, building tools) that you can switch between
• Projectiles (for archers/hunters)?

And I got some basic collision and tiles done!

In my game you won’t actually control this guy, though. I’ve got a nice idea planned out that involves a cat. You will be the cat, given to this guy by some old dude with a beard, and you will accompany this guy on his quest for whatever I come up with. While he struts on, encounters foes, and gets stuck by puzzles, you will be the awesome cat sidekick who saves the day by sneaking past foes and striking them from behind, climbing and crawling to parts where he can’t get to so you can bring back important items, and generally be a badass cat without animations. And in the end, glory shall be all his and not yours.

I have chosen an appropriate name for my game concept and run it past my marketing department. They say it’s a go, and they’d like me to stop talking to them as if they aren’t imaginary, cause it’s freaking them the hell out.

The game shall be called “Flea Bitten”, and it shall be infested with fleas. But not just any fleas mind you.

I can ask this next question, only because I feel completely safe and secure inside my game dev bunker.

What if…. a zombie had fleas ? We all understand that a zombie biting you results in enough zombie juice to turn you into a walking corpse. But I don’t think that the opposite has ever been explored, as human beings have evolved enough to realize that zombies don’t taste good.

But our little friends in the insect world, in my best estimations far from being educated by the likes of George Romero on the Zed. So… I’ll leave you with that for now…. well, because it’s really all I have right now!

Update from the bunker -- Game name chosen -- "Flea Bitten"

So I’ve got an idea mostly sketched out for a top-down adventure RPG (very original I know). The twist of sorts is that the character is unarmed – perhaps even pacifist. And his enemies are very much not.

I’ve created a basic engine, where the player is controlled by the mouse, and levels are loaded from text files.

I’m also streaming on livestream, at http://www.livestream.com/thristhart. The quality is terrible because my internet is terrible. So that’s cool I guess.

Ok, first of all my main concern is the theme, but instead of making a random game based on any of the other theme candidates, ill give it a try and try to make a game with the actual theme of the compo.

(do notice im analizing the theme as i write)
First of all, what the heck is THIS? at first it could be a weapon of some kind, something that helps me in my quest.. yeah, sounds nice but too normal. A weapon could be a sword or an AK-47, so maybe not a weapon..
It could be something more friendly, something that helps me to achieve the quest in a more easier way (after all the theme impies a quest for sure) That could be a peak if i have to digg, something to jump higher (a pogo maybe? haha sounds funny) or maybe something to dive in deeper..

Now, the object can only be deduced by knowing where we are going to, since you wont give a toothbrush to someone who is going to kill zombies.. unless the zombies need a teethbrush and they need to be willing to get it..
Now, where, where in hell can we go??? maybe we need to rescue our girl who was kidnapped by a big n ugly monster, and in the way we slaughter other littler monter’s.. so we leave the kidnapper to the last.. Sound good to be, but i guess it a bit of a cliché.. (clichés are awesome)

Mmm keeping this line of thought the theme is quite doable.. i guess i changed my mind from when i started writing this post (yeah, i can change my mind pretty quickly hehe) So, ill keep poolishing the “Where” and then make a “What” ..The girl and the monster sounds like the best option so far 😛

Theme. The Force is strong with this one. Although you can probably just make any single game with a tool and say, oooh wait, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this <insert random tool>. Be it weapon, magic staff, vehicle, football, companion, etc. But hey why not, we had more generic themes before, turned out fine.

This is a declaration of maybe, maybe not, since tomorrow (and by extension today) is national day of awesome here in Finland, and I may succumb to peer pressure and actually go outside with people for fresh air and social reinforcement (it’s dangerous to go alone, here take this friend/beer). But I guess the main festivities start later in the afternoon so I may hack up together a small joke game or something until then.

Tools. Lua for sure, maybe with LÖVE or my own lib evöL. Other tools will be according to random inspiration.

Seems there’s a lot of people in, which is good because more games, and bad, because the chatter on the IRC channel and compo blog will be hard to decipher. Also each individual gets a lot less attention, especially newcomers. It’s a harsh world. Dangerous out there. Ha. Anyhoo. Good luck all, kudos for the keynote, and remember to keep hydrated.

Quickly I realize I’ll want to NOT have to fight against my development tools. While I enjoy Chicken Scheme and think it’s the future of my own programming environment, it’s just not ready yet. I want to draw things on my tablet and use them but I don’t even have images ready in Gloss yet: it make take a few minutes to add them, or a few hours if I run in to some unexpected snag (such is the nature of programming). And, I’m being made aware of the fact that most LDers run Windows, and a Mac OS binary won’t be properly appreciated by the widest audience. So, I’ll be using Processing for this LD. One click to run, one click to distribute a “binary” that runs cross platform on Mac OS, Windows, and GNU/Linux. I think I’ve assimilated Lisp programming style well enough to do things the “Lisp way” even in Java, so as much as it pains me to go from one end of the programming language power spectrum to the other, I think this is a good choice. And Processing is the right choice, because as Reas puts it:

I want programming to be as immediate and fluid as drawing and I work with software in a way that minimizes the technical aspects.

I can’t think of a programming quote I agree more with, or that I think is more important in this early age of the practice.

So far I have modeled the main character and zombies, animated the main character and started to add logic to him. Right now you can walk forward and back, and shoot. Time to get some zombies in there.

-JaydenB

I picked first-person platformer as my genre. Somewhat like Mirror’s Edge, so expect to plant your face against a number of walls and fall off of high places. Unity can handle the 3D rendering, I just have to code the gameplay and drop in some original assets (taking my camera out hunting for textures tomorrow). Here’s a screenshot that tells you absolutely nothing about the gameplay:

It’s past midnight on my coast. Time for some shut-eye.

Ok, 2 hours passed and I’m done with map editor – now I have to start working on actual game. We’ll see how sweaty is it going to be at this part I’ll write something more about details of my game later but so far I can only say that it won’t involve any killing around so let’s hope I can still bring lots of fun.

Map editor done with saving and loading maps

Late post but i’m going to be using C++ and Allegro with Code::Blocks.

Your 9 to 5 desk job is clearly not cut out for your martial arts skills, neverminding the fact that Joe Soap (your only friend at the office) if encouraging you to take the initiative. It is time for you to GO POSTAL!!

Joe Hands you a ???, and says “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take This!”

So yeah, Im probably aiming a bit to high here, but will see how it goes. I will be doing 3D (no animation though, sorry guys) in XNA and the aim will be fore you to terrorise your office in the best ways possible before the police or the waaaaaaaaaaaaaambulance arrives to cart you to the looney bin. Im hoping to go for a cartooney look and have some action billboards in 3D space (“BAM”, “POW”) as well as combos and stuff. But first off, will get my base code going, and then build up the office. So yeah, an arcade “destroy it all as much as possible” game in 3D. Lets hope this turns out well…

Well a handful of you know how much I’ve complained how busy I am at work. Really if I manage to create _anything_ for LD this weekend I call it a success… A smaller amount of people know that I lost several hours of work there, so I am even further behind. But after going home to relax and “sleep”, this idea and sudden burst of energy has overtaken me. I have an amazing idea but not sure I can pull it off. I guess I’ll put a few hours of effort into something and then go to bed never to touch it again over the weekend…

But it is a neat idea in anycase … lets see what I can pull out of thin air between working and the times I am supposed to be “sleeping”…

Here goes nothing… which is exactly what I expect: nothing.

So, I’m pretty happy with how things have worked out so far.

Before this LD48 started, I spent the last month or so building up some basecode to deal with tilemaps, sprite animations and created corresponding editors.  As a consequence of this, I immediatly started working on my assets.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of my editors, I really feel these preparations are paying off

Hello everyone! Who wants graphics in their games these days? My game is called Gafl. (Graphics are for losers) and is going to be about drugs and prostitutes and Russians… Or something.

Screenie: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

I’m hoping to complete the world’s first mission-based, side-scrolling real estate development sim! You play as the Demon Princess. Rather than ascending to the throne of hell, however, your life-long ambition is to run a successful real estate development company. You’ve just run away from Hell, and it’s your first day on the job. Now clear out the spider infestations from those basements! But wait… it’s dangerous to go alone. Take this…!

I’m learning pygame on the fly for this one. Uh… hope I’m not dumb for choosing something I have no experience with… I’ve already got some level music, at least.

And also back with food

Steak, mushroom & pate sauce, some veg. Fuel for the programmer!

It’s Dangerous to go Alone! Take this!
In this game, you will move a guy through an obstacle course. He needs multiple instances of him to complete it, so he needs to make copies of himself by copying “this“, which will be the surface of the screen. The surface of the screen at the time of the pull will be shown on the dude’s shirt, and a new dude will appear after each pull.

Scrapped my game twice already before coming up with this.  I’m going to be working on this for the GMC Jam too (the theme is Insanity) so it’ll be related to that.

I really can’t give away much without spoiling the ending, but the basic idea is a shoot-em-up that takes place in the different lobes of the brain, and every once in a while the psychiatrist (above) will give you pills to “help” (hinder) your progress before you face off with him in the end.

Would write more but I’m tired.  G’night!

Bah, couldn’t sleep. Too hot. So decided to check out if LD is offering anything compelling. Not really liking the theme as all ideas that come to mind would require 15 people and a year or two. But perhaps I’ll figure something out.. Good luck everyone!

I think next time I’ll use Flixel or FlashDevelop because Blender is being  pain in the *** when trying to make this game. I’ve use it before but have forgotten one thing, bullet collision…

Off to sleep. I’m timelapsing this time too.

Alright so I had ideas planned out for “Absorb”, “Climbing”, “Traps” and this theme, so I at least already had an idea of what to do.

As I mentioned earlier, I am using FlashPunk and AS3, which are both news for me, and progress as a whole is likely to be slow. Also a lot of people are bothering me on MSN for some reason which isn’t very good. In any case, I set up my project with packages and some scaffolding code, some temporary images and tile sets, and have the idea solidified in my head. So far I am aiming for the main “level/world” of the game to be “playable” by tomorrow afternoon, which means the functionality of the HUD has to be put in, and then I’ll work up the actual gameplay.

Basic premise is the same as in Zelda, but the old man in this game is probably not as wise.

In an attempt to get a better idea of what the main characters in Flea Bitten would look like, I took a stab at drawing some conceptual artwork. The one on the left is a non-zombified flea. The one on a right is a zombified flea.

I wanted to spend adequate time ensuring they were distinguishable, and if you look “really” closely, they are. trust me on that.

I’m finding that this this game concept is truly making little use of my lack of artistic abilities thus far, which can only mean good things for the game.

1 beer down. I have a game concept, a name for the game, and conceptual artwork.

conceptual artwork - flea and zombified flea

2.5 hours in and my second game prototype is scrapped. Except this one isn’t really scrapped, because I really like the idea. I just don’t think it would fit in well with a competition like this. Definitely going to work on it after the competition though.

Next idea is going to be a tower climbing. Might as well stick to the tried and true formula of entering a platformer.

I just came home from the bar to find that THIS won. Awesome. Now to sleep and ponder the possibilities.

EDIT: I’m probably going to use flashpunk when I awake,  but in case i don’t my c++ basecode is here :https://github.com/grieve/stile

Grieve.

Alright, so the game I’ve decided to make is quite an interesting one. You are sent to save your galaxy from a giant machine that has positioned itself in the center, planning to destroy everything. Fortunately and unfortunately, you are put in charge and are given a beam that allows you to take control of any technology you aim it at. The giant machine starts its attack sequence and you must micromanage its weapons and prevent them from destroying your galaxies planets. Additionally, you can take control of the planets attacks, and help the research new weapons and defense mechanisms to take this beast down. As the game progresses, the attack you must avoid hitting your planets with become stronger and increase in quantity, making it harder to manage. Here is a screen shot of the “Death Machine” so far.

I have a lot in mind for this one, so wish me luck! Hopefully my eyes aren’t too big for my stomach…

Super excited about the theme.  I’ll be brainstorming tonight.

If I’m working with a program that can’t export human-readable source code, does that mean I can’t enter the competition?

Making a post before going to bed
My engine is almost done. There are blocks, gravity and you can destroy clusters of colored blocks \o/

Graphics are placeholders ^^

Here’s a quick screenshot of what I have so far for my game, Quaintbrush.

All of the player animations and the movement engine stuff are complete. The paintbrush mechanic I’m working on is in progress.

But that hasn’t stopped me from working on the art. Here’s what I’ve got so far

I’ve got a good idea for a gag in the first screen, but beyond that I’ve still got no clue what the gameplay is going to be like. Oh well, time to start coding!

Tags: progress, screenshot

So here’s my game idea,

Title: Forever Alone

Style: Platformer

You are the piano instructor for a princess in a fantasy setting. You have a secret crush on her but this is absolutely forbidden, one night after your scheduled lesson you are caught looking her directly in the eyes for longer then 2 seconds by the Royal Guard! You are immediately banished to the dungeon to face execution. The next morning it turns out the princess is kidnapped by an evil Necromancer who is looking to make her his undead bride. You are taken from the dungeon by the King’s personal guard and you have just been officially been drafted into the military on a mission to go rescue the princess. But of course the guard will send you in alone first to face the Necromancer, don’t worry though, they will give you the necessary tools to survive!

This will be made with FlashPunk and FlashDevelop, I plan for it to be a silly adventure game with laughs and puzzle gameplay.

I have a core mechanic and a bit of story in mind: that involves Monkeys, Robots, Zombies, and the LD20 theme.  I was originally going to use GameMaker, but took the fact that it’s not installed on this machine as a sign I should use XNA instead.  So I’ve started putting together some basic engine functionality.  I’ll start implementing and testing the mechanic idea in the morning.

This is my game. Needs actual graphics, actual dialog, and actual sounds. Programming is about done though! That’s all I’m doing for tonight.

It seems like a lot of people have already designed their game engines and everything that has to do with the game, and are going to try to sneak the theme in somehow so that their game qualifies for this competition.

I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that’s taking this a little bit too seriously. I’ve been given a theme, I’m making a game based around it. From scratch. With shitty code hacked together at midnight.

like many others, i was also surprised to see the theme^^. i just woke up, and gotta say: this – is – friggin – awesome :D. a fun game theme!

let’s see what we can do!

Quick food photo, nothing fancy. A few adorable left over Easter eggs, some Kielbasa and assorted things.

Poor adorable eggs. You're going to a better place.

And the result:

I guess technically, not the final result.

Totally set food wise, good into the early morning. Was busting my butt trying to get a trailer done (check it out it’s spiffy), and game up for XNA peer review for the past 24 hours. Starting to wish I would have gotten at least a little pre-compo sleep. Hopefully the over abundance of food keeps me going.

After playing a bit of Dad N’ Me and thinking about other similar Behemoth games, I just can’t bring myself to fire up Flashpunk. Looks like I’ll be going the normal Flash route for this compo. It’s such a shame too, because I’d love to come up with a simpler concept just to get some Flashpunk experience, but I’m drawing a blank for this theme.

Tags: food, foodphoto

Well, I’ve got the basic idea for my game down. It does involve the theme along with Lava, Little kids and Invisible friends. I have an edited tool list!

Flash Devlop and Flashpunk
Omgo Editor to make levels (Still getting to know it, but the tutorials are making it easy )
Photoshop CS4, might go to vector tomorrow after I clear my head.
Sfxr

Hopefully I’ll have time to put in the story, we shall see.

My game will be called “Nitro Racer”. This will be a post-apocalyptic racer with a twist. Not only do you have to win each race to progress, but you will also need to keep close to your opponents during the race, or you’ll die. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”.

Here’s a teaser story-card:

As you can see from this image, I’m not an artist. I will try to aim for a comic graphics style. Now on to make some tiles for the tracks..

Not my favorite theme (so many good choices, but yet again everyone picked a safe generic one :|) but I think I settled on an idea after throwing away about 3 more ambitious ones.

The main character arrives unarmed at a cemetery for some undecided reason, and encounters a hobo that hands him a shotgun while delivering the line.  He enters the cemetery and sure enough, the dead are rising.  You shoot zombies for a bit from a top down arena shooter perspective then all of a sudden the hobo comes back and says something like “no wait, I promised that one to my buddy” and takes the shotgun away and gives you some other weapon.

Long story short, you’ll fight zombies and every 20-30 seconds the hobo will come back and give you some other weapon to kill zombies with.  My plan is to make it interesting by coming up with wacky things to use as weapons.  I’d like to add another layer of gameplay by varying the types of zombies and making them weak to certain classes of weapons but not others.

I might change it from zombies to something else since they’re overdone but naturally its the first aesthetic that came to mind.   Now off to work!

Figured it was about time for me to post info on my game idea.  I’m taking a sideways route around the theme, but I think it still fits quite nicely.

Title : As yet undecided, I’m sure I’ll come up with something witty later though.  Current working title is ‘Small Hands’

Concept : You are a thief, and you need the gold.  However you don’t want to get pinched by the fuzz.  So you start buying orphans from the local orphanage, and training them to be your little thieving monkeys.  You send out the orphans in groups to steal as much as possible as they can and come back to you safe ( without being arrested ).

An orphan sent out by himself is likely to be caught by the police, thus diminishing your income.  The idea is to plan accordingly so that you send out enough orphans that they can collect appropriate amounts of money, and then make it back safely.

So, the theme? Dangerous for the orphans to go alone.  And they take your stuff.  Clever little orphans.

Will I get it finished? Hopefully!

I decided to go with the adventure/rpg route and I’m currently looking at tiled map generation. The player would start in a town and perhaps buy/sell items and then explore the world (see screenshot) where treasure and enemies await.

I’m thinking that if a battle occurs, it can be resolved RPG style by cutting to a battle scene and choosing to use options or items.

It’s also 5am and I’ve been awake for 22 hours. I might go watch the sun rise and put on some coffee

This is my first ludum dare competition, so I’m not really sure what to expect. But I’ve watched enough reality TV show competitions to know that you need to be ruthless. Make them think your thinking one thing, and then be thinking exactly the opposite so you are always one step ahead.

Tell them they need a rebecca black soundtrack  or their clouds really need some work. They can’t stop singing friday and obsessing about clouds and you are off in the clear making a kick ass game. It’s a competition, and you gotta be in it to win it.

That’s why i’m in the bunker. Someone tells me to start fixing clouds and shit.. and I’m flipping them the bird and just writing better AI code while sipping a beer. Can’t rattle me.. this place is reinforced like a mother trucker.

Rattle the competition... make them doubt themselves!

(Programmer art FTW :D)

Making progress, the player now doesn’t fall through the ground, and effects such as rain are working properly!

TOOLS: Unity, some random utility scripts I use

DEPLOYMENT: Web

GENRE: Bromantic Match3 First Person Sniper

IDEA: What’s more dangerous than unprotected sex? Yowza! As WingBro, the guardian angel of bros everywhere, you have to analyze how big your buddy’s unit is and then launch an appropriately sized condom through the open window and into his hand.

Concoct bizarre chain reactions where guys in adjacent hotel rooms with similarly sized peckers are climaxing to earn mega points.

I’ll pair it with Ode to Joy for Peggle-like ecstasy.

Appearently I’ve forgotten all I know about programming in Flash, I’m getting stressed by Chronolapse and all you other guys stuffs looks amazing already! I hate you all for being so awesome!

My idea so far is basically about a guy living in a hourglass that is entrusted with a sack of sand. With this bag of sand he will be able to fill holes and build hills. That’s all I got for now, trying to get some platformingish game with worms/lemmings-type enviroment to work.

So here’s what I have so far. Not much to look at yet. I’m planning that it’ll a) look like an actual foresty landscape, and you’ll be able to walk around it. Then the ghosts will come after you. Luckily, because it was dangerous to go alone, you came prepared…

So far I have a story and some music. Too bad some of the music loops badly thanks to one misplaced note. But oh well, that will do.

As for gameplay? Still none. Might work on it tomorrow but I’m getting a new computer so I might be playing magicka all day :X

Lot’s of work ahead, so i’m keeping it short and bundled

That’s my awesome tri-screen workplace setup:

That was my breakfast:

And that’s my progress:

Game is called Hoarding Inc. I’ll explain more details when they are done.

Play it here: http://www.sos.gd/ld20

Playability report: tutorials done, movable sprite

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 3:31 am 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’m getting a bit of a late start, but I figure I can get a couple of hours work in, and still get up reasonably early tomorrow.

I’m at a bit of a loss for what to do with this theme.  But I’ve wanted to make a Zelda-esque adventure game for a while, so I’ll start working on the engine for that.  The idea will evolve over time.  My first instinct is to build my own engine, but ld48 experience tells me I need to simplify as much as I possibly can.  So I’m going to go with Flixel.  I haven’t worked with Flixel much in the past though, so I’ll have to start by reacquainting myself with it, and getting something simple up and running.

Woooooooo! My boilerplate haskell code came in handy, although I had to fight with the input code for a bit, and I still only have a black window that prints input events to the console.

I’m in guys!

I didn’t have time to announce, but I’ve settled on the tools, settled on an idea, and got a skeleton coded up. For this LD I’m using pygame. The idea is a metroidvania type sidescroller, but probably not too heavy on exploration. Haven’t decided what theme I’m going to butcher with my programmer art. At the moment I’m more worried about getting some of the groundwork done and I’m planning on working out the ideas later.

Anyways I am so stoked for this LD, the theme is great! Good luck everyone!

Our brainstorming went like this:

• LOL
• OMFG!
• Challenge Accepted

Then, we started improving over the concept of having the old dude from Zelda giving you random and useless items whenever you start the game again. However, no matter how useless the item may look there’s always a way to finish the level with it (by either using the item in a unique fashion or by taking another path where that item becomes handy and allows you to reach the end of the level).

Once we agreed on that, we started thinking on what the game genre would be. We narrowed the choice to “Shadowgate-like” and “Platform game”. What we chose will be a surprise.

Then we decided what the character and enemies will be (that’s a surprise too) and we started thinking a little bit into the game “story” (or at least what the player’s mission will be).

Then we improved the original concept a little bit, having the old man giving you a different item from the array of  useless trash he hides under his bed useful tools he willingly shares with the player, so, if there are 4 tools and 4 levels there will be a total of 4*4*4*4 = 256 different ways to play the game from start to finish based on what the dude gave you for each level. Not bad for 4 levels.

Now we are coding, making the base classes and improving an old map editor I made in my early days of youth to fit our purposes. We may release it to the LD community if it ends up being a multi-purpose and useful tool.

(To be continued… someday)

On my graphics. So I’m going to go for a library that I wrote for graphics recently. The zip is at this link.

http://db.tt/DR6prD2

Hi everyone !

So here are my plan for this week-ends LD.

I’ll be doing a rogue-like with a twist, that twist being based on the theme. I want to “roguelike” (yes, i just used this as a verb) the concept, by making the player start off with some random equipement.

From swords to sticks, and having some really stupid things like coffee “potions” or toothbrushes.

I’ll stick to some ASCII based graphics to start with and if I have time i’ll try to “upgrade” them. So my plans are to finish the game engine first, random generation etc, then implement items and finally do a graphic polish.

Good luck to all, I’ll post screenshots when it gets interesting !

Many thanks to Zephaire for helping me get this idea.

The game is about a fighting tournament where you fight others to prove you are the greatest fighter in the world. Your grandfather, seeing you are going to a dangerous place alone, gives you his knowledge about ki.

The gameplay is really simple. Same way as Punch’Out, you fight one guy each time. Each fight is split into your turns and the enemy turns. You have two attributes to help you fight: life and stamina. Life is what keeps you fighting. Stamina is what keeps you punching.

During your turn, you define your action using a Bejeweled board, similar to Figure 1. You select a group of elements which corresponds to the action. Those actions are: healing, attacking and ki. The selection of the elements is similar to Dungeon Raid (Figure 2).

Figure 1 - Bejeweled

Figure 2 - Dungeon Raid

When you select attacking elements, you attack your enemy, depleting his life and your stamina. If your stamina reaches zero, you lose one turn.

When you select ki elements, you recharge your stamina. If you combine these elements with attacking, you do an special attack. They diminish your stamina much more than normal attacks, but also give much more damage to the enemy.

When you select healing elements, you recharge your life.

At the end of each turn, your stamina is slightly recharged.

During the enemy turn he can give you attacks or special attacks. Mostly, they damage your life. However some attacks also damage stamina.

The winner is the last one standing.

Each time you win, you get closer to be the greatest fighter ever. The enemies get toughter too.

Well, that’s my game idea, hope it’s good.

I’ve got an idea for my game. It is a top-down, multi-directional smhup, as I had planned.

The title of the game is “Broadsword” and it is about a civilian who gets pulled into a conflict between an evil dictator and a resistance force in their homeland, which is on the brink of becoming a crapsack country. (As opposed to a crapsack world, which is not necessarily the case)

The theme is in the story. For the early parts of the game, (And those are the parts I’ll be making) the player will be alone, only interacting with the mech’s internal computer and using abandoned garages in various places to do maintenance and change weapons.

Later on, in parts that I will make after the jam, I will probably finish it over time, and the story will be much more complete.

The theme is used, by the way, in the sense that:

• It’s dangerous to go alone: There are bad guys everywhere
• Take this: The mech’s computer urges the protagonist to do what they wind up doing
• With this plot, it’s more “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take me!”

I’ve got high hopes. Currently, I have an untextured, unskinned mech model, an application with a fair amount of boilerplate done, and it registers input events.

Hopefully, this will all work out.

Here’s hoping,

— Mr. Dude

I started my LD entry, so far you can fly around on the randomly generated map.  I made some quick blends between the dirt and water, I probably won’t change them before the end of the LD.

Now I just need to add weapons, enemies etc…

So while this was the theme I knew I could never get a proper idea for, I went with this one:

A friendship roguelike.

Your character suffers from extreme loneliness, to the point where it’s actually unhealthy.

Point of the game is to go out and gain friends, and befriend them enough so that they’ll give you kind words, items or phone-numbers at the point where it gets late and they have to leave you, and you’ll be struggling with your loneliness in your apartment.

It’s a survival game where you’ll try to survive each day and struggle with your autophobia

[X] Sleep

[X] Idea

hmmmm, it looks like I have everything.

The game title is…. “Overcoming danger with trees or: How I learned to love the tree and time-travel in one direction”

No graphics yet, they are on the bottom of my TODO list for today 😉

The enemies in my game will primarily be Zombie Ghosts. Zombies because they fit into the game, and ghosts because I don’t know how to program the A* algorithm into my game. Having ghosts allow me to just make the enemies go through walls.

With map editor done, I started to work on the game itself. So far I have scrolling map done (optimized map render) and character is moving independant from scrolling (red circle) – so far so good.

Game will be top down or maybe under small angle – I can’t wait to start working on graphics but I have to do programming first, Yaaaarn….

Game Idea is finished and written on paper (you’re gonna controll 4 characters in a haunted house simultanously)

Engine from scratch is begining to work, animated sprites and moveable objects work, walls and collision are next

no graphics yet, so nothing to show

Good luck everyone! 😀

OK, Hi!

I must say the theme is not 100% to my liking, but hey that’s what this is all about, no?

Anyhow – my idea is as follows: You are a warrior sent to a dangerous/scary mission, maybe to a forest or something like that. probably to kill a DRAGON.

Anyhow – it’s dangerous to go alone, so the village/town/kingdom wizard gives you this sidekick – a small creature that accompanies you, provides light and possibly some defense/offense capabilities.

The game will probably be an isometric platformer of some sort – but as I have never wrote one, it might be harder than I think!

Good luck to everyone!

Daniel

Ok so, while working on the procedural level generation for my game I got some new ideas that I now can’t wait to try out on one of the longer term projects I have been working on, and… I’m no longer very motivated to finish my ludum dare entry

So yeah, FAIL

Continuing from my last post, I have modified some of my plans due to how FlashPunk does things (yay learning), and am still working on the interface/HUD.

Comparisons to another, er, related game are somewhat obvious. Nothing moves, aside from the sword cursor. Still have to add in the rest of the HUD entities. In any case, I need a break from programming and drawing, so I am going to watch some TV and plan some stuff on paper for a bit.

Hi all,

I have been experimenting with an isometric graphics engine, so I will take the opportunity to make it real: our game is going to based on an old game engine – Filmation

Filmation

The scenario is going to be a bad neighborhood, you’re on your own, and you receive an object to defeat your enemies and rescue…. you know the rest.

The object is going to be an old cassette-radio boombox and the gameplay (not defined yet) is going to be around music and cassettes.

Happy LD!!!

So, I mocked up a level background and what the game would look like, then directly imported those into the game and added a player object.

Im going to add some parallax background layers, so the bg will scroll while moving.  Yay Reginald!

Because I’m not from the same side of the Atlantic as many of you, I found myself starting the competition at 4AM.

Sadly, I have a complete lack of an ability to work when tired, so I got up at 4AM, checked the theme, and went back to bed.

I will start by saying that I don’t like this theme. Which surprisingly means that this competition is going to be more interesting than I expected.

Given the scientifically valid *cough cough* equation, Interesting = Fun, I look foward to taking part in this competition, and to seeing what others come up with.

Anyway, so far I’ve only have started working on the engine.

Oh, and I’ll be using Gamemaker (stop laughing at me, all you VB users 😛 ), along with FL Studio trial version for sounds (me and my budget are an awesome team), and as for graphics, I’ll be using the gamemaker sprite editor. I also may quickly make a program for animating humanoid figures.

Good luck, and think outside the box!

They watch you...

Creepy? Cute? W/E

Movement is in, as are these little fellas who just can’t seem to live without you.

Spoiler* You aren’t alone.

Space Genocide! Yes, sounds horrible. This is the menu to the game I am making, it even has blinking text!!! 😀

This will be a sidescrolling shooter game where you go to an alien planet. And of course it will be dangerous, so here’s an SMG.