Got up and read the theme, over breakfast this song popped up in my head originally it had more of a ballad character but for sake of simplicity it  kind of went down the electronic vocoder synth road, enjoy!

Ah and usually I dont sing, so this kind of the first song I recorded, well it’ Ludumdare, anything is possible.

Tags: LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!, motivation, music, song, take this

Being a European I woke up at a nice and early 4AM to see the theme.

Then slept, because being a European, I do that a lot 😛

Personally, I think the theme is a bit meh. But that’s good. It makes me get out of my comfort zone, and work on something new and different (saying the same thing twice there -.- ).

Anyway, I have an engine, a plan, some character graphics, and have spent way too long getting those three the way I want.

Thankfully the rest should be easy. Although I may be wrong. We’ll see.

Here is a very useful screenshot.

OK I have a game concept, with an idea for the styling, first things first though breakfast!

yeah you saw it here first

nobody steal my idea ok thanks

map made using Tiled.

Old Man made in GraphicsGale.

(Going to be using previous production version of Flixel)

Tags: don't steal it please, original idea, totally new

…highwaymen? Running a caravan guard service? Hmmm.

Well, it’s off to a slow start, but I can render a chunk of voxels.

That’s supposed to be a shrubbery.

I’ve still got a long way to go…

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 7:35 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.

Well, I’m having some problem coming up with ideas here. Or more accurately, deciding which out of my candidate ideas are good ones. Here are three of my candidates:

1. Robots in a facility trying to escape except one of them is for some reason (to be decided) temporarily unable to move. This immobile robot provides advice to the mobile (player character) robot. “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this advice.”
2. A cat with a cannon that launches itself takes on an invasion by the dog and bird alliance. Cannon being both the cat’s only weapon and means of long-distance transport. Thinking more like a platformer instead of one of those “press button, launch thing, hope for the best” games. And the cat has some ally who delivers some new neat thing every level. (“Every level” already ringing alarm bells for me here.)
3. An average guy wandering down the street before he suddenly gets some improbable weapon thrown out at him by a clearly insane person screaming the theme at the top of their lungs before disappearing altogether, and then beat-em-up with increasingly bizarre enemies or something.

I haven’t really got anything else here. I already had to sleep through the start of the competition. 7.5 hours gone and I don’t even have a concept yet. Aaaaagh! Curse you, sleep!

I have to give up.
Here’s my two part timelapse videos :

and here is source and binaries (XNA 4 runtime required).

Hah, time is flying, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

Might wanna click that a couple times so you can see anything… not a very big screenshot or anything. And kinda low contrast. Just a little guy with his gas mask, standing around. You can use the keyboard to walk him around, and he animates it as he does so. Turning out pretty okay so far. I always forget how long it can take to do anything graphical; my last entry was ascii-based so I got right to gameplay after the first couple of hours.

All is well, however; I’m getting over the initial setup hump and into the actual fun parts now. I think I’ll try to talk about the actual premise of the game in my next blog post.

Brainstormed for the last 30 minutes,
but the Zelda reference was just to strong.

No open world though. (Mainly due to my handicapped state.)
Let’s just say “Nethack with a twist.”

Gonna create an empty project and start with the dungeon creation.
Timebox: 2h. (of actual work on it)

You are a bird, having a machine gun 😀 ’nuff said

Engine is mostly done, including map loading, collision and damage.

Decided to go with 16×16 characters to make animation easy and fit as much shit as possible on a typical browser game window.  Here’s my first attempt at the main character, bear with me as I don’t pixel very often.  Yes I defaulted to him looking sorta like me, but I dont wear orange vests with blue shirts though.  I should go to bed, but I’m getting so much done!

It’s going to be platformer based…. and… you might get a jetpack in late levels too.

…I like the idea of flying tortoises ok.

And I would show you my workspace but it won’t let me upload a picture

Completely new to this and late to boot.  I’m going to try my hardest to reach the compo deadline but if I don’t I’m fine with submitting to the jam. So far I’ve worked four hours, altering my own source code to suit my game. The second I saw the theme I knew what I wanted to do, but for now I’m going to keep that a secret. I have a little sneak peak though (image to the left).

I may run out of time and have to use an external source for the art and music but I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. If it does I’ll be sure to link where I pulled it from.

I’m thinking of making a game based on a ladytron song-title “They gave you a heart, they gave you a name”, meaning you play a sa dark charcter/spawn and your goal is to get to the living world, and you wont survive without a heart and a name. You wont be able to enter the living world without the heart and your heart wont survive for long without a body, and everyone knows that a spawn with a name is powerful…

Anyway, I hope that I have enough time, since its walpurgis night and well…

“During the day, people gather in parks, drink considerable amounts of alcoholic beverages, barbecue and generally enjoy the weather, if it happens to be favourable.”

Well, I made quite a bit of progress. I hope to have my engine totally finished by tomorrow night, so I can spend all of Sunday mapping everything out and getting the art together. It was unwise to choose to work in a language that I didn’t know, but things are coming together, so it’s all cool

I can’t wait to get up early tomorrow to make the oden I got from the Japanese grocery store! Then I’m going to implement some collision detection, the mouse physics, and start breaking my code up into objects and getting it data-driven. I really want to get some cool stuff happening with blend effects, too.

In the meantime, sleep! Night all.

A lovely avocado sandwich which was consumed!

Should keep me up and running while I start coding!

Daniel

What I’m eating while writing this post:

Here’s my sketch / ideas / incomplete todo list :

I sucks at drawing but I have to write ideas even if I’m the only one to understand what it means.

The compo started at 4:00 am in my local time, and it’s now 12 pm. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of game I could possibly make in 48 hours and in accordance with the theme. I was close to give up. But I’ve decided that even if the game will be bad, deja vu, not original I will just enjoy making it and have fun. So here it is

The first screenshot with our little yet unamed buddy.

It will be a metroidvania. Probably. With a little twist in the story. If I have enough time to do all that I planned.

Tags: food, screenshot, sketch

Yeah !

I’ve now textured my labyrinth and we can explore it by clicking the way you want to go

Now, let’s add some darkness and ligthning atmosphere !

This is what I have so far. It’s a good work in progress.

-Shadows semi-auto-generated (and shrinks when Sam jumps in the air);
-Parallax elements (Sky, horizon curves, yellow road strips);
-Characters (Sam & Dog) walk in the same relative parallax speed as the road strips;
-Dog walks, and using the RIGHT-ARROW key, you can advance Sam to catch-up;
-LEFT-ARROW key will yank the dog back into the camera view (one of the goals);

Alright… 7am… definitely need a few hours of sleep!

I can safely say that this screenshot took WAY too long to process.

What were you expecting, something intelligent?

Anyways, there’s a nifty little hook system there, which should be sufficient for the framework I’ll be making.

With that said, I’m going to bed. Good night guys.

I thought that I will only have time for maybe jam, so I selpt long and just discovered the theme. And had an idea. And thought, hey, if I hurry (a lot) and take an hour here and there … Of course I wouldn’t take my framework from the last LD then and go with plain JS and HTML. Any objections?

Oh, and I name that idea “Take the cat and run!”

Here’s the startscreen 😉

Hmm? Got one other model mostly finished, just needs textured and rigged. Underlying code is starting to take shape, and I should be building my world before too long. Unfortunately going to be interrupted by 2 trips downtown today, but I think I’m doing pretty good so far Finding some new ways to do things that I’ll probably apply back to my engine that I’m cannabalizing as a “library”.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 8:10 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.

Oh man I am at a loss… So far my ideas are:

Tumiki Arena – Tumiki fighters except in an arena. It would fulfill the theme because every time an enemy died, they would give you a gun or whatever for you to handle further enemies. This could either work in robotron style, or in astroids style. With the second one it would be a bit like captain forever. I don’t think that is a bad thing though.

TowerTron – Similar to above, but you can pick up and drop turrets. Maybe this is more like herzog zwei crossed with tower defense. I don’t know if I can figure out A* this time though, or really any pathfinding.

Castle Defense – Missile Defense, except you can occasionally add stuff to you towns and cities, and they all shoot automatically at the missiles. “this is a dangerous place to have a town, here take this”.

Ok gonna just roll with one of them. I clearly need to light a fire under myself, I just spent 20 minutes messing around with my timelapse script. HOLY CRAPPU, GOTTA ROLL.

Also, here is my desk, and my lunch and dinner (I just cooked 2 meals at once):

Tags: concepts, desk, deskphoto, food

So I decided to keep things simple you just have random objects that you can throw rather than having guns and swords and all that complex stuff. The items spin through the air as you throw them and it looks kinda funky as it rotates from the top left, but I like it.

Being woken up way too early with back ache is not the best way to start LD. D: But at least it gave me time to think of ideas.

I didn’t want to do another visual novel (whyyy?) but it seems like it’s going to happen. Eep! I’m determined to get a game done as being the 20th LD, it feels more special and fancy and magical.

Good luck everyone! Make beautiful games! :3

Hey all!

So the theme was kind of unexpected, although it won with a big margin!

Saw the theme at 3am (local time) and after discussing it with my wife, she gave me a good idea and I just built on that…

On my game, the player will have an item given at the start that modifies in some way the “game world” and he has to pass through the level using it… The cool thing is the item has usually a “bad thing” associated with it, so it really makes the level more dangerous, not less!

Should be able to pull this off…

Desk shot:

Alread loads of cool stuff lying around…

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
• ….

I know i suck at modelling )

Gonna get some rest, but I’ve gotten some decent progress done building the basic mechanics for my game. I was blessed with an idea pretty quickly.

I love short swords

See you in the morning.

Gameplay code is now in a basic form, with several physics objects in place. Doesn’t look like much, but this is what will be driving the final game. Onward!

Time for a first screen.

It does some quite cool things sometime, but others it looks weird. Well, I don’t have the time to fix it anyway.

So now the corridor generation to do. Then map generation will be DONE. (That was the hard part, i think).

Random generation

2.5 hours of work so far, took me quite some time to settle on an idea and I’m still not sure about it. We will see…

…thanks to a Japanese exam that I most probably failed, but anyway, time to get started.

I’ve got an idea that may prove a little over-ambitious, but if I’m careful about limiting the scope of the features I implement, I think I should manage to do it.

Just a teaser before I have something to show : it’ll have a little of Canabalt in it…

That’s all for now. Wish me luck !

Literally this second just found out the theme. Okay, Interesting.

A couple of ideas have sprung into my head, but I need to go food shopping first [ That’s life ] . I’ll let the ideas simmer in my head between the dairy, veg and snacks section.

1 day 15 hours remaining.

The theme is a bit of an odd one, but I don’t think it’s terrible. That being said, I don’t actually have an idea yet!

First thoughts:

• Where are you going?
• Why is it dangerous?
• What are you given?

Naturally, all my vague ideas are monstrously too big for 48 hours. Maybe some kind of randomised structure, so that each of the three questions has several answers. But that still doesn’t help me know what I’m making! Especially if I want to stick with text-commands. Hmmmm.

Time Awake: 8.5 hours, Time Asleep: 0

I’ve now got a basic menu system in place, buttons work, and the player is able to get to the “game”.

My focus now is to get the map generation going, and ensuring that save/load works (The load button does work, it’s just that it won’t do anything if it is given a file).

For those interested, you can find a copy of it here:

http://mitchdev.com/projects/ld20/builds/Release-Build0.zip (1.27 MB)

Back to coding!

Danger…

Taking a break and working on art…. Who would ruin a perfectly good sign, certainly not someone so cute… certainly.

Also, hope to eventually fill the hamster ball with something… yet to decide what.

Thanks to the wonder of Unity, I have a player and 3 bots flying around four way points. The planes are temporary, but the ground is finalized. I spent 2 hours working on it.

Playable version up at:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld20/ld20.html

sonnybone teaser 1

I have my main character sprite MOSTLY animated. I have the runs, the jumps, the falls, the turns, the stops. Now I just need the fights and the swims. Then I have to draw enemies, the rest of the level sprites, create the sound effects, write the music, record the voices, then slap it all together with a story.

Yeah… that’s not gonna happen.

Now I’m going to sleep. See you suckaz in a few hours.

Tags: screenshot

First: Let's get the art assets ready...

Like a Zen Koan it is the themeless theme this time.

Does this make it easier? Or more difficult?

… is all I’ve got so far It’s flash, click on the image to test it. I’m going AFK to make some lunch.

Tags: screenshot

It’s a little later and I’ve done a little more.

I drew a stick figure player image and a star and put them in the game. I also have levels now, they’re loaded from text files.

Next: Physics, i.e. the platforming part.

After that: Come up with something the player gets because it’s dangerous to go alone.

So long,

Mr. Wonko

I’m in.

I’ve finally found an idea for this theme that I am inspired to make a fun game with: Convoys!

My original idea was to race with a convoy of crazy cars and trucks and try and get as many of your convoy as possible across the line. I quickly changed to UFOs becuase it doesn’t matter what way they are facing. This means I don’t have to muck around with a bunch of sprites and try and get changing directions to look natural. Also, UFO races sound fun.

Here is my first screenshot:

This is my second Ludum Dare and I am using Game Maker. Good luck everyone!

Here’s the first screenshot of what I’m working on, I’ve knocked out the movement part of the platforming, everything seems smooth and responsive.

So far, I got, a charactertemplate who can walk around and pick up stuff. Sadly, stuff is yet to be implemented.

I got a basic pixel-particle-sand rain going on.

What really sucks is that now that I reallly gotten into this, I have to leave for 24 hours, which will make finishing this competition really hard. Gonna try to make some real graphics on my laptop during that time though.

We’re a team of three, Po8rewQ as coder, RyF as game designer/sound guy and myself Luc as pixel pusher.

We’re leaving in a company house and realized by chance yesterday that we were all interested in participating to this Ludum Dare !

– Flixel 2.5 / FB4Linux

– Bfxr,  MilkTracker.

– Promotion, Artrage.

Hello, I’m going to participate in LD 20, pretty excited! 😛

I will be using:

Engine: Unity3D

Graphics: Paint.NET

Sounds: http://www.bfxr.net/ (wav generator)

Who says that’s not a word. Anyhow, work on my game, as yet unnamed, has gone suprisingly well. Too well, some might say. I’m pretty tired, so just have a screenshot.

It’s time for a screenshot:

Not much to see, I’ve got a scrolling tilemap in place.

Next I’m going to get somethings moving around on it!

Tags: screenshot, scrolling, tilemap

Yummy!

Let’s get back to coding…

Tags: foodphoto

It’s been.. 9 hours! I’ve amassed 500+ screenshots and settled on something achievable! But this is just a milestone..

I have myself a temporary menu/state handler, and a good deal of prototype code – I spent 2 hours after the theme was announced brainstorming and had a lot of ideas to balance out! Here are some ideas which came out that I rejected:

• Implication of danger/attack (intense atmosphere)
• Items of power (balanced gameplay is important to me)
• Paranoia
• Emotional independence
• Clones
• Dying if alone
• Wildcard: honeytraps

Here are the idea I’m adopting:

• Survival
• Trails (tracking or tracing paths)
• Distractions/focus
• Context sensitivity
• Separation

I made some concept art with some distorted perspective which I’m growing fond of.. I think an extra dimension will bring it more to life?

Either way – sleep is next on my agenda.

Tags: day1, milestone, sleep

Just under 9 1/2 hours down in the compo, and all I’ve managed to do thus far is sleep about 8 hours and read up everything going on here. Y’all have some hilarious and awesome ideas, it never fails to amaze me what the developers here can do with a theme!!!

Shower time in a few, then work for 10 hours at my “real job”, then get some dinner. After that, it’s on! Will leave me about 25-26 hours left to work, but I’ve learned that being forced not to develop for that long has two benefits:

1) I get LOTS of time to think about what I’m going to do, get lots of ideas rolling and really plan out what I’m going to do.

2) Actually WANT to get into coding again, since I can’t for so long.

Good luck everyone, although it seems you won’t need it with all the awesome screenshots and all you’re already posting

There’s a game where it’s incredible DANGEROUS to walk around without certain (hard to find) items.

Tower of Druaga.

Zelda was most likely partly based on this game, so it kind of fits the theme. I went to sleep just after the theme was announced, so I’m only just getting started now.

Morning doodles.

Engine: Very simple grid-locked movement. Tiles are drawn overlapped at a slight angle, so when I draw I might just compress the y coordinate a bit (keeping things square in the game physics of course).

I’d have to do a lot of graphics though. The humanoid characters would have 4 directions and walk frames, and the main character has the sword and shield states on top of this… so I don’t know if it’s doable. I might have to be very sloppy. To avoid what happened to Legacy of Hydon (1+ day on art, then 6hrs or something left to do all the design and code), I might do the engine first this time. I’ll be using BlitzMax 1.40.

So I’m happily coding along, and then BAM. It stops playing. I have no idea what I changed, but I can’t find it. Why didn’t I set up git? :'(

But bullets are now effected by gravity wells/repulsers for great chaos, yay.

Even though you people love the shot of my specs all in green, here’s the first real one of the start screen. No game UI yet but that’s coming next. Whatcha say about the tagline The Hero’s First Choice?

Tags: trollbridge armours

So first 5 hours have gone since I got up and started.

Green and Red lines ftw

One idea started and killed as not feeling right, second started and the basic flow logic seems to be largely working as wanted. Next step is creating some objects to make it bit more interesting than a line going down the screen…

Illness has made the last hour or so hard but hopefuly a small break will kick that cobwebs from my head for the next 5 hours.

And managed to not click publish it seems… so erm late

Very first build steps with Unity…

The Island emerges from the sea

Will update as I progress, hmmm movement next perhaps?

Simple damn gameplay!

Yay, only 6 hours after I started do I have something with game play. It’s pretty simple, enemies just spawn progressivly faster. At the moment it is very easy so I’ll ramp up the difficulty and make it possible to die. I’m probs not going to expand on the gameplay too much and work on adding more weapons, finishing touches and cutscenes. Possibly achievements!

Wow. I keep checking the blog and it’s like everyone else is so much further than me because they didn’t spend the first eight hours of the competition asleep or something!

(Damn timezones.)

But I’ve decided to go with the robot idea I mentioned earlier and have just been setting up the platformer physics before I start making things more interesting. I’m trying to focus on art and other niceties like that AFTER the core mechanics are done.

Screenshot may not accurately represent final product.

Yes, it’s a platformer. Yes, there will be some relevance to the theme eventually. As for me, I’m going to stop ignoring my empty stomach and go eat lunch. Noodles, probably!

Spaghetti with tomatoes, ham and cream sauce.

And here’s a present state of my TODO list:

Tags: foodphoto, progress

Hello!

It be me, Man of Doom!

I now have an idea and my work area pretty much sorted. Time to begin work!

I’ll be using GameMaker7, SFXR, LMMS and that’s about it. Also I’ll be working on my wife’s computer as my laptop (which has my internet connection) has rubbish performance.

Where I be working

psychosock concept

More than 9 hours passed and I’m still working on my project. Honestly, everything goes better than I anticipated! Only thing that went wrong is my time lap which won’t be avaliable because software keeps crushing and I’ve lost 3 hours on start but I took 2nd option and recorded everything with fraps so far – I’ll make “visual-game-lap” from start to the end.

Next to that, name for my game has been chosen – Courier of the Crypts!
ou’ll be playing young courier that is delivering letters around the kingdom. One day, he gets a letter from the old man addressed to the “Keeper of the Crypts”. This old man warns young boy that “It’s dangerous to go alone!” and then he gives you a special torch whose flame only burns using magic coal. You’ll be wondering around the labyrinths of the crypt until you find the keeper but be aware, your torch must burn with strong fire or you’ll become pray of twisted beigns that are hiding in the dark corners.

what I have so far

Facts:
– 9 hours of work
– 2 hours of sleep last night
– Lots of coffee drank
– Map editor done
– Basic graphics done
– Moving character around is working perfectly

There is a lot of work ahead of me but it won’t be a problem except if my body cuts me off lacking some serious rest. Oh well… For now, I’ve prepared some pasta with tuna in vegetable sauce and if anyone else is eating right now then good apettite 😉

my lunch

It seems everyone is working realy hard on their projects and that’s the true spirit! I can’t wait to try some other projects at the end but for now, I have to concentrate on my piece first. Good luck everyone and have all the fun you can!
PS: Wish some luck to me as well, I’ll need it!

He fires arrows and shit.

Just had lunch, and improved map generation by cleaning the occasional monoblocs that appeared on the map (couldn’t figure out why but i fixed it). Next on the list, corridors, I’m about halfway through that.

Try it out with the swf if you wish to : https://rapidshare.com/files/459912228/BUILD1.swf

Feeling a little ahead of schedule I decided to spend a bunch of time reproducing the LoZ tileset, overworld and interior, plus a couple of additions. Here’s an in-game shot of a screen loaded from the server.

Still a few hours left tonight. Hoping to get all the graphics and database crap and everything totally done so that I’ll have a whole 24 hours for game logic.

Oh, what’s my game actually about? Hacking and slashing as you build the whole world with other people (yeah, there is a basic grief control system). The map is currently about 1,500,000,000 screens… I might need to adjust that. And I should probably think about adding some sort of teleport function. And work on a title.

..implemented

It’s such a beautiful weather out here and all I do is sitting inside, eating pizza, drinking icetea and and producing code… Well, on the other hand my game now has some kind of menu, health bars, multiple levels and some performance issues fixed.

Today I’m going to code hardcore! but first I have to take the stupid dog to the vet…:'(

This is a couple of the traps from my Ludum Dare Comp entry:

It’s a story driven game.

More info to come soon.

Development blog:
http://ludumdare-hq.tumblr.com/

‘It’s dangerous to go alone… take this…. grappling hook!’ is the basic idea

Using Unity this time, and I’ve only spent a couple of days learning the basics. Been having a real hard time getting meshes from Blender into it cleanly, but now I’ve got a first block in, I’ve been writing some scripts. Got a basic (brute-force) tilemap system, and simple platformer physics/collision (just done my own, to avoid some of the trickiness of using ‘real physics’ for a platformer)

Also figured out that you’ve got to smooth time.DeltaTime values yourself if you want anything to run smoothly when vsynced…

‘Playable’ version here

A slow start and a late first screen shot of a randomly generated maze – cavern. Based on my current progress it seems, I won’t be able to get the normal amount of sleep, if I wish to finish in time for submission. The next few hours will be interesting.

So I made the movement engine, most of the spriting and a bunch of levels. I am not fond of the player sprites now… I’m going to have diner in a couple of hours I think.

Animating 8 directions is quite hard, so glad to get this out of the way!

My idea’s to be a Take Away (‘take out’ for Americans) delivery service to deliver needed items to adventurers, so I based my player character on the Nissin Noodles delivery boy. Reference.

Here’s a timelapse of my first ~10 hours of work. Sorry I didn’t add in any catchy music or anything. I’m thinking making a full-length timelapse of the whole compo once it’s done, so maybe I’ll throw music in on that.

Uh… not sure how to do this right. Have a youtube link: MY AWESOME TIMELAPSE

Tags: timelapse

here is my task list :

1. build models :
1.1. mailman
1.2. zombie
1.3. kitten
1.4. building
1.5. sidewalk
1.6. street
1.7. shotgun
1.8. street light

2. prepare sound effects
2.1. define sound track
2.2. record zombie sound
2.3. record kitten sound
2.4. record shotgun reload sound from nerf 😛
2.5. find shotgun shooting open sound
2.6. find steps sound
2.7. create sound track

3. create user interaction
3.1. arrange in the scene the first city with some streets (copy real neighbour ?)
3.2. add camera to the character
3.3. move the character
3.4. define positions to generate zombies
3.5. define kitten positions

4. prepare actions
4.1. get weapon from kitten
4.2. display and count lifes
4.3. game over scene
4.4. shoot and kill zombies
4.5. count zombies killed
4.6. deliver letter

5. add main screen menu
6. add final score screen

lets do it !!

Tags: 3D, banana, breakfast, food, oh crap, panic, ru out of ur mind, task list, too many

Race you to the top.. ;0)

Remember to slow down before you hit the peak!

Island racing…

I have been working for 4 hours now. My game is coming along pretty nicely.

Here is the first screenshot:

Look at that insane programmer’s art!

no images yet sorry. i’ve started quite late.

Side scrolling platformer u walk through a forest attacking enemies and they drop “Gold” and u can go to the store and buy better weapons with that money.

First of all me and probably many others h8 the theme, and think that if voting was done again, it wouldn’t be reelected.

Also, I think themes like these alienate contest participants from outside world even further. It is hard enough to explain to the “normal” people how you are going to spend weekend as it is, and now with this theme its even harder to communicate the idea behind it, I mean it sounds more or less ok when you read it on the internet but if I try to explain to someone that I’m doing a 48h game compo with theme being “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” I’d get beat up by cool kids, or even worse, fall into dialog which looks like this:

“Take what?”

“… What?”

“You said its dangerous, and I should take… This something…?”

“Oh, hah, no, its a theme for compo…”

“Oh… Well, it doesn’t relate to me in any way and you will have none of my support, call me when you grow up”

Well, I can bitch about theme whole day long, but in the end I think I’ll just not participate. Too bad, I had high hopes for 20th ld, it got screwed over by theme comprehensible by  zelda fans only.

Of course, all may not be as black as it seems, and if an idea hits me I’ll get to work to finish it on time and eat my own words. But the only good idea I had so far is already being done by at least two guys (working as item seller).

Man, looking at all the other screenshots on here I feel kinda embarrassed with my progress. It took me a long time to have a really crappy animation of my character. And yet I still have to build the platformer.

Even the level generation is very bad. And let’s just not talk about my jump behaviour. First time for that, but this is really bad. Well, let’s see if I can get it to behave better from now.

Next step: Random level generation

It feels like most of the programing is complete, making the levels and graphics will probably take a lot more time. Here’s a screenshot with silly placeholder graphics:

I’m going to sleep.

Not made much pogress code-wise, but have an idea of what I want to do.  Somehow, a sort of non-euclidean (or at least an impossible space) maze has slipped in there, even though I had no ideas for non-euclidean before the actual theme was announced.  Just sort of seemed to fit natually with what I was going for (a sort of L-Space feel).  Anyway, some scribblings and a sprite with the general feel I want.  Not sure if I can push out enough assets in time, will have to see how much I can get done tomorrow, for now it is bedtime.

With two dead-line filled coding jobs keeping me busy 7 days a week and barely having done any coding besides this for 8 or 9 months, I’m ill prepared for this LD. Tired, no proper dev environment set up, blender  isn’t compatible with any of my old stuff. So have to compromise a lot – most likely won’t have anything finished by the deadline.

Also, I don’t like open themes like this. And this one is the worst I’ve ever seen – it’s basically as good as no theme at all – make any game and have an old man say “it’s dangerous to go along take blah” and it will perfectly fit the theme. So yeah. Having watched a play-through of the first 20 minutes or so of the original Zelda (shamefully have to admit I never saw the game before) I do have a vague idea though (“remake Zelda” :P). Any finally knowing about this game is one good thing I can take from this LD

So anyway, the plan is to fix up my C+Allegro framework to latest versions of everything and use it. And right now I’m writing a custom Blender export script from scratch, for Blender 2.5. Took me some time to figure out where to place the addon… so hopefully I can speed up a bit now. Here’s a screenshot of my progress so far:

my great progress...

Totally forgot about LD until today. Luckily there is still some time left, so I’ll take a shot too. My tools of choice:

• Python with the pyglet library
• Gimp and inkscape for graphics
• Sfxr for sound effects

Let’s go

Having much better luck this time around, wrote a simple citygenerator for my game, where the chosen character will walk around and try to befriend npc’s until night hits and he has to go home to his loneliness.

This was interesting since I’ve never done anything like this before, now I need to implement some text drawing routines and I’ll be able to move on to more gameplay stuff, and after that hopefully further the mapgeneration with objects and more specialized buildings.

Oh yes, my screenshots are going somewhere, the html5 canvas is already painting the inventory for me. Next is the combiner and then we can open shop for all those heroes in need of a decent weapon.

Tags: trollbridge armours

Okay, got the basic framework for a level generator with an interactive editor implemented:

When you change the parameters the view updates immediately

Currently the generator just spawns a lot of colored boxes.  The next step is writing some more interesting generators, and setting up the physics so that you can jump from box to box.

Given the theme, a tile based platformer adapted to 3D might be an idea, I’ll see where I go from here (no, I don’t have any overall plan :p ).

Now they can move and chase the player.

Unfortunally, progress  is going too slow.

I’ve now set up the way my tilesets will work as well as sound effects and have finished the Main Menu to the game, here’s a screenshot:

Catching up with before i get a little nap (its 9:46AM over here, and i havent slept for over 15hs now..)

So, the platforming engine is now completely done (with walljumps, animations, colors for the character, blah blah blah) So i made the ghost that will give you your watergun to kill monsters!

Take this watergun!

Basically everything in the intro is drawn, but i need to scan it.. i guess ill have to do it later, since its too early in the morning.. After i finish the intro where you are given the quest, i can happily start making the enemies and the rest of the story. I guess ill have to keep it short since its gotta be done for tomorrow.. well see how that goes.

See ya all in dreamsland! ^^

CB2 has filled up nicely, as you can see in these photos taken with my crappy camera.

Also I have filled up nicely thanks to delicious nourishment provided by CB2’s kitchen (nourishment half-eaten before I remembered to photograph it).

Here’s my game so far:

I won’t say too much about it yet, and to be honest I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with it yet anyway. What I do know is that my game is going to have a lot more focus on the “take this” part of the theme than on the “it’s dangerous to go alone” part. I can’t see myself picking up many points for great use of the theme.

Since I can’t think of a decent idea for this theme, I’ll not participate on this Ludum Dare. I tried to do some prototyping but all seemed meh to me, so instead of doing a game that I know that it’ll will not be good at all (like my previous entry, Portrait Exploration) I prefer to wait for a theme that suits better to me.

Can’t wait to see what everybody else did in the end though!

So I had a complete change of idea for how the setup for the game should be after a conversation with someone. Rather than be assisted by some voice in the facility, instead the player character takes the other robot along with them and can use them as a platform. The immobility is caused by some experimental device that leads to the robot being immutable in space, which is also how they can be used as a platform (and for some reason the robot’s legs aren’t working I don’t know bear with me here.)

Okay, so, I think I’ve planned out the main thing. Each level/screen/section is basically push button, open door, get to door, next level/screen, except using other robot as a moveable platform. No direct upgrades, instead having new features.

Hazards can be things such as pools of energy that just happen to be lying around, electrical strips intended to take down rogue robots if crossed the wrong way, and the good old laser beam. Also, some mobile enemies that can’t really be defeated directly, but perhaps destroyed if they’re made to fall into a hazard themselves.

Other things that’d be good are launch pads to launch the player into space, conveyer belts because they’re always fun, and devices that can return platformbot back to you for use again. Also perhaps a means to give powerups like a station that allows you to jump and replace the platformbot but only once. Well, let’s see. I think I’ll spend the rest of this day implementing as much cool stuff as I can and spend tomorrow creating graphics and levels.

Hi everyone, I thought I would be participating this time, but then I realized that it had already started. Hopefully next time I’ll be  more ready! Good luck to anyone else though.

Been at it for 11 hours – started off pretty good with pixel art that for some reason exceeded the quality I’m used to make. That’s a good sign. Been spending too much time debugging silly things from my rather unstable basecode – but it’s getting a lot better.

So, I’ve decided it will be an action RPG ala Zelda – an obvious nod to the original source of the theme.

My plan is to work for another 3-4 hours, before I eat dinner and head for bed. When I get up again, I plan to work until the deadline.

I had to sleep, I’m really sorry I’m not one of those persons who’s able to stay awake for a night. I just slept 4.5 hours, though.

My brain feels sluggish since yesterday. I got a simple addition wrong LOL I’m such a sissy, but I’m toughing it out.

I’ve got a good idea and I have to master the art of working offline while I’m in the bathroom or going to the office.

I just managed to align my game to the beat. Was harder than expected.

In the following version enemies only drop from the top, in the final game they come from all sids, and other patterns.

For now, WAD or UpLeftRight to use your pepper spray in that direction, which only works if you got it ready (which is displayed by the arrow. the numbers are the walking cycle)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17041897/Main.swf

Now listening to: EPIPHANY – BIT.TRIP FLUX

Not really useful yet, but I’m happy with the way it turns out

I’d so want to work on my game, but alas, I’ve promised to go to a party. Hopefully I can catch up tomorrow. Sadface