My favorite genre of casual game currently is demolition-type games (especially on the iPad/iPhone). Think Angry Birds, or iDemolition. I really enjoy the games which present you with a sturcture and a minimum amount of materials/equipment with which to bring that building down. While I love the puzzle aspect of these games, sometimes I wish there were a sandbox mode that I could just mess around and blow things up in. My game is my attempt to (sort of) realize this wish. I want to make a game where the goal is not to bring down a building with the minimum amount of force- it’s to completely, ridiculously destroy the building in ludicrous ways. My original inspiration for this game was a demolition game where you hurl huge meteors in the sides of buildings, sending parts everywhere.

I might not even submit this game, but I’m having a ton of fun creating and, most importantly, playing it so far. If anyone wants to follow, I will likely post updates only on my blog at http://codenameian.blogspot.com/ since I’m not sure how the blogs work here. Is there a way to view all posts on, say, MiniLD #26 at once? Or is the only way to view other people’s posts through the dashboard view? Very strange organization… anyway, the required post:

A: Name of the game

Overkill Demolition Company (I need a better name, I think.)

B: Description (140 chars)

Destroy buildings in the most extreme, overblown, and stylish methods possible.

C: One mockup image

See blog: http://codenameian.blogspot.com/2011/05/overkill-demolition-company-part-1.html

D: Definition of Done: (Example) 3 levels, 3 enemy types, 1 boss, music track, sfx

Necessary:

* Physics of buildings and explosions

* Scoring system

* A level- or money-based unlocking system

* Three distinctly different and fun weapons

* Randomized maps (since the game is not about puzzles, why have premade levels?)

* At least 3 different building templates

* At least 2 different building materials

Hopeful:

* At least three weapons, including passive (bombs, nukes, meteors) and active (godzilla, mechs) ones

* Random building construction (this seems hard) rather than templates

* Good, non-programmer, graphics (pipe dream)

* Sounds

Those last two hopeful goals might tell you my personal goal for this game. I don’t necessarily care about the vanity polish of this game. Since I wasn’t sure where/how to post this post, I am already about 40% complete with my game, and I already legitimately have fun with it. That’s ultimately my goal, is to create a game that I want to play. And crappy canned sounds repeated ad naseum, and ridiculously detailed graphics really don’t make a game any more fun to play. It’s not something I would show off to someone necessarily, it’s just meant to be a fun time distraction!

Anyway, I imagine few people will read this. If you are actually reading, leave me a comment with any thoughts? I’m going to keep working on this, but I’m not sure if I will submit it- I would probably be embarrassed to do so.

Not sure if I’m going to bother actually starting this game, but here’s the concept nonetheless

Title:
In case of emergency use stairs

Desc:
You are aware of the presence of cake on the main floor; get there ASAP via the closest elevator and let none get in your path.

Mockup:

As you head down in the elevator, others will try to hitch a ride. you will then need to use a combo of your abilities (open doors, close doors, emergency telephone, Lobby button) as well as changing the indication of which direction your capsule is moving in. every time someone is let in, they will select a floor they want to go to. The floor they wish to get to will be incremental (first duder wants the lobby, second duder wants the 1st floor, etc.). When you arrive at a floor someone wants to get off at you will be forced to stop, slowing you down and making it easy for others to get on. The game ends when either you get to the lobby or your elevator is forced to move upwards (because the last selected floor is higher than your current height). Yeah.

Done when:
The game is done when there are atleast 50 floors, randomly interspersed, and everything mentioned above is included. There will also be a menu and a menu theme and a song for the game itself, aswell as some encouraging vocal stuff when you pull off good combos. There will also be a score meter, giving you more scores the better your combos.

I’m spending way too much time on pixelling! But it’s fun to see things look good…

The funny thing is that none of this was specifically in my “Done List”, but how can you plant and harvest if you can’t thresh and hoe?

Well, here we are. I’m not nearly as far along as I would’ve liked, and I have probably the most daunting of my tasks ahead of me: Making the AI that guides the opponent ‘player’ in my game. I’ve never done anything like that and while I have a pretty good idea about what I need to do, there’s always all sorts of gotchas. In any case, right now:

• I’m not in love with the tileset, but it’s functional. The NES palette is pretty terrible, but I feel like I’m committed. That’s fine, really.
• Dungeon generation works fine, though the autotiler I made has trouble with some edge cases (corner cases, actually). I’m pretty happy with how the dungeons look. If nothing else, I learned some really useful stuff doing it.
• I think I’m changing the name to “The Legend of < >”

I’m a little confused about the deadlines here, I’m operating on the assumption that I’ve got a whole day ahead of me (Sunday).  I’ve got the basic mechanics working, but no drilling (which is kinda a basic mechanic so maybe I lied earlier in this sentence).  Gonna keep plugging tomorrow.  Rendering speed is an issue — can only draw so many hexes before the framerate starts eating it, but there’s a bug somewhere that’s preventing me from caching rendered data.  Probably something simple I’m too tired to see right now.

Screenshot (in-game this time, not a mockup):

Very intimidated/impressed by the other posts people are making.  Nice work, y’all.

Magix: Elementus

Still two player but now you can absorb the magic from the elements around you…

[Done] Absorb Elements

Next

[] Launch Spells

Due to my lack of proper time sense, I wasted too much time on useless stuff while coding this project.

But I’m glad to report that I managed to acomplish everything promissed. It flickers badly, has a few nasty bugs, but in the end, IT WORKS!

It was funny how I spent the last half-hour just balancing the game and the boss.

I had great ideas on how to tell the funny game story or on how to make a awesome boss, but I decided to get-things-done, ship it and leave those ideas for a future expansion ( for those who saw me @ IRC, probably know I’m very focused on Android and J2ME and I would love to port the game for these platforms).

In the end, the boss den was made into a forth level. Not bad!

Now, its time to figure out how to upload(?) the game.

Screenshot:

edit: now I realize I sent it 3 minutes to my deadline!

Of course. I know I can do a LOT better than this, but my focus wasn’t really on quality, but rather on finding how to improve my “Get Things Done ™” skills. The most important skill from this skill-set is to see your limitations (mine was more of time than of knowledge or anything like that), set yourself a reasonable goal and accomplish that. In that sense, I believe I was very successful. And most of all, I had lots of fun knowing you folks!

I hope to be here more often on more LDs and MiniLDs!

Thanks for all of you.

I just realized one small but funny mistake:

The game takes place on the portuguese province of Tras-os-montes, but that province is not on the alentejo!

That will need a rectification very soon…Tomorrow I’ll also set up the game embedded on a webpage.

So long, and  thanks for all the D’s 😉

I’m officially forfeiting the Mini-LD. I don’t have any chance. I’m not even close to having enough of SpudTech implemented to make a real game.

I’ve put a bit of a spin on my idea, and I’m going to be working on that for the time being.

I’m probably going to sit out the next couple of Mini-LD’s. I need time to relax; doing an LD every month isn’t good for me, I think. I’ll still be on IRC, and I’ll probably post my progress here on the LD blog.

I will definitely enter in LD #21, but until then I’m laying off of LD.

Peace, love, and restfulness,

— Mr. Dude

Im going to bed posting my tech demo of a generated world, rendering 10000+ sprites at 50 fps in flash.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/848324/minild26/Auuuuu.swf

Until next time gadget! Next time!

I’m very happy to introduce you gLapse 0.2, the visual GNU/Linux tool to take screenshots at fixed intervals and make time lapse videos of your compo progress. If you didn’t knew gLapse you can check out more information about this tool in my first post. At this moment, gLapse is available in English, Spanish and German.

Changelog

• Configurable video quality (very bad, bad, normal, good, best).
• Synchronized screenshots output and video input folders.
• Changes default screenshots output folder.
• Adds German translation (thanks to Superyoshi).
• Improves GUI usability.

Download

• gLapse 0.2 Debian package
• gLapse 0.2 source package

Feedback and new translations are hugely welcome, if you find any problems I would be grateful if yould report them in the issues section. Hope you like it and find it useful for the next compo!

Tags: gLapse, GNU/Linux, GTK, gui, screenshots, time lapse, tools, video

The core mechanics are kinda working for the two players and the split screen is also ok, so now I will add a win state, a title screen, and then to try to adjusts values and fix bugs before the deadline.

Btw, does anybody know at which hour its the deadline?

And screenshot:

It’s almost done, but I wanted to share some progress during the evening lunch : I used Unity3D for 3h44 minutes now, MonoDevelop for 45minutes,  SeaShore (pixel graphism) for 1h 8 minutes, and GarageBand for 27 minutes so far. That’s a little more than 6 hours of work for the current progress of Dirty Things Tracy.

What did I do ?

Tracy has got a single level with a 4 screens size. The old-school scrolling works very well : reminds me of Rick Dangerous, so it’s a little bit more than expected: well done !

The dirty t-shirts monster are there, with a very limited sprite animation, 2 pictures : done !

The “compactor” works well, even if there’s a weird bug that cause the weapon to fire the wrong way just after you’ve change direction : done !

No sound FX nor background music are done for now, I didn’t find the right sound to make it during the little half an hour in GarageBand. Not done !

But, I did more than that : traps are present and you’ve got a full playable level with a second weapon : the mega block. The mega block is made from four compacted dirty t-shirts that you have compacted with the first weapon and then retrieved by walking through them. Then you can use this mega block on the level to be able to walk over a trap !

Before releasing it, I will/would like to :

– add sound effects and background music,

– fix the first weapon bug,

– add a graphical GUI for the compactor and mega blocks

Here are some pictures (remember I’m not a graphist !)

Sadly, I can’t finish. I was clearly overambitious, even though I thought I wasn’t being. At least I’ve got some nice code from it

Yeah, my intention to enter this was too ambitious. It’s a shame, but rather than consider what I’ve done so far as a waste, I will keep working on it, and I’ll post a link or something to the final product here anyway.

(Is there a Jam (72 hour) for this compo? Because if there isn’t I’m totally defining one and pretending it existed the whole time.)

Hey guys, unfortunately not going to finish this on time at all – it didn’t help that I double booked this weekend with having my mate visit!
It’s nearly 5 am in England and I have a Software Engineering exam on Thursday, so I’m going to hit the hay and start revising!

I got as far as having most of the lower level bits in place, things are starting to come together… I might see if I can finish it over the coming days!
Here are some screenshots of what I have so far:

I defend the silly amount of time I spent on the title screen by saying I built it out of low-level parts... that's legit, right?

You, your fine hat and your accomplice have a nice chat with a scientist...

So yeah, this competition has been lots of fun to take part in! Hopefully I’ll sort my time better for the next one!

Sorry no web upload just yet.

Well as it’s a long weekend here in the UK I’m going to continue working on Magix: Elements…

[Done] Toggling of spells Absorb / Emit / Launch / Golem
[Done] Spell Icons working
[Done] Casting of spells launch items absorb cubes

Have all the basic elements in place but need to add…

[] Golems Move towards Enemy
[] Golems Battle Enemy
[] Golems Break Down Obstacles
[] Magic usage limiting actions
[] Magic level bars working
[] Launched Spells blow things up
[] Emitted Shield Cubes snap to world grid
[] Win lose state – Inflicted Zero magic = Lose

I must admit I have been a bit relaxed as it’s a mini LD, but I think I have an interesting idea here and it will be fun to see how it plays.

Finally, I’ve got a full level running, with music, sound effects, fully playable, traps, dirty things… Ok, I’m going to bed, I’ll tell about the timescale later…

Just before I go : here’s the link to my entry : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-26/?action=preview&uid=4277

Didn’t manage to completely clear this weekend of distractions, but fortunately it’s a holiday weekend and I’m willing to go for a 72-hour time scale. Gonna try to get everything mechanical pointed in the right direction tonight and fill in the game content tomorrow. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like right this minute (very similar to my earlier mockup).

I have finally finished Silhouette Skater after what seems a very long weekend.

I managed to incorporate most of the features I aimed for except for the detonating player unfortunately. I will carry on with this project in the future and add extra levels and features etc.

Please play the game if you get a second and post you death count in the comments section. I would like to create a little score board.

Screenshot: