Hi! I’ve only recently found Ludum Dare and I was looking for a chance to enter. This seems like the perfect time.

I’m just starting in game development. Honestly I’m a bit better at developing resources (graphics, music, etc) as opposed to programming, but I’m driven and not afraid of the challenge.

I’ve already the idea for my game in place. In the interest of keeping the post short and tidy, here’s the short version: My Ludum Dare attempt will be a run-and-gun type game inspired by Gunstar Heroes with a dash of puzzle game thrown in for good measure. Elemental gems influence your attacks, and the gems are constantly changing beyond your control, forcing you to change tactics on the fly. To turn the tides in your favor, you can “eject” the gem to enable a grenade-like attack or combine two gems into a powerful new attack. You don’t have the luxury of biding your time for a perfect gem combination however, as the longer you draw out a battle, the more powerful your adversary becomes.

If that interests you and you’re hungering for a little more info, you can find it here: http://www.8bitpalate.com/2011/10/my-game-idea-for-the-ludum-dare-challenge/

At any rate, I’m excited to see how everyone’s attempts turn out.

…this my unexpected goal: buy the Impact framework http://impactjs.com

My name is Floriaen and I am actually writing a HTML5 game during my free time.
Of course, instead of sleep.

I am on Twitter: @floriaen there is some goodies inside!

Thanks.

Tags: html5

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that I finished and published a bigger version of Pvt Littledude vs Robot Armada, a game I did originally for Mini Ludum Dare 28 (and got #1 for Fun, yay!). It includes more levels, better balanced gameplay, infinity mode, achievements, lots of original music, etc. etc. So now it’s even more fun! (But not apparently enough, since I failed to get a Flash sponsorship, but whatever. :))

So, here it is:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/gimblll/pvt-littledude-vs-robot-armada

My choices:

• unfinished visual novel engine (android) – I believe I misplaced the source
• unfinished bullet hell engine (android) – Needs everything except the actual bullet engine
• LD21 entry: Urth – Needs about 2 tons of polish
• MiniLD29 entry: Redeye – Needs about 20 tons of polish
• Something completely new – no

Tags: android, java, update, urth

…almost nothing. 😉 I will be using FlashPunk for my game (yes, I decided to start a new one), and will try to get the $1 via Kongregate ads.

As for the game itself, I have a few pieces of an idea, and that’s it. I’ll post more when I’ve done more.

Tags: idea, Kongregate, update

My take on the October challenge is to sell an actual copy of a game, which I didn’t manage to do so far. I have licensed flash games, but I never even tried to sell a copy of a game directly to end-user.

So, my game is… McPixel!
I have already begun work on this and made a few levels. I need to pull myself together and manufacture the levels like there’s no tommorow!

Here is a proof of intent:

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you should play the original LD21 entry

Anyways, the idea is to take it to the mobile market. I hope it will work well!
Also, visit my blog for some more detailed updates.

October came around, and I started working on a game.

It’s javascript/canvas based, instead of my usual pygame. But, I’m using gamejs which uses the pygame API, so I feel pretty much at home.

We got most of our new graphics and sound into the game today, and all of the game play is done.

It’s not running fast enough on my ipod touch 2g, but I think with some work it could be playable. So we’re aiming to release on the various web stores first. Then perhaps improve things for the mobile platforms.

I had to work on improving a sound engine I call jquery.shitsound, or just shitsound for short. Which uses various web browser sound APIs to work. I’ll have to get it using the phonegap framework to play audio too, since html5 Audio on mobile platforms is simply broken.

We’re in, I should say. Since I’m doing a collaboration with Spencer Sternberg ( http://www.spencersternberg.com/ ) video game audio and music productions.

The second app I’m working on next after this one is released I’m doing as a Powered By Bees production ( http://www.poweredbybees.com ). It’s less game related, and more content related, but I still think it will count for this October Challenge.

Thanks Ludumdare!  This October competition has really given me a big kick up the backside.

Hello everyone!   OPifex Entertainment is a group of friends who are dedicated game development hobbyists.  We’ve recently banded together to form OPifex, and right now there are four of us: three programmers, one team leader, one artist, four game designers, and one writer.  You do the math 😉

We’ve decided to take up this challenge to push ourselves to create a game using the new engine we’ve been developing.  We’re going to focus on a small, simple game we’ve dubbed “Splat!”.  The idea was to focus on one core mechanic in order to keep the game simple.  Color blending was chosen, as few games effectively utilitize color as a game mechanic rather than just an art style.    I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of the game just yet… but to give ya’ll a little teaser, here’s our first concept art!

Here are some updates and more info on this particular project:

The funky ship is untextured and therefore very funky!

Summary:
You’ll be a bounty hunter or contractor doing jobs for differnt people. You’ll be visiting different planets or areas in space, like nebulae or asteroid belts for fulfilling your objectives. You will be able to visit other solar systems for more variety of quests, vehicles, items and locations.

Technically i want to have an editor that is capable of designing different planets that are distinct from one another, so no planet is like the other, and there are several ways to do that. For now i will be saturating textures differently for planets to appear distinct from one another. I will also add foliage soon for several types of environments.

Gameplay wise it is your regular shmup, but not all the same! Take from this whatever you might

Concept of two regular boring ships, probably not gonna make any of those, just adding for good measure

Also i am looking for a decent title. Space hunter is good enough as a working title, but it fails as a product name!

Anyways i will advance gameplay mechanics the coming week. So stay tuned for some actual shooting stuff!

Yep, Ludum Dare is running the October Challenge again – and I’m in, of course!

As some of you might remember, Kobo II begun life in last year’s October Challenge. The plan was to start really small, with little more than placeholder graphics and basic game logic, especially considering that I would use my own language EEL, which didn’t even have an OpenGL binding at the time.

[…]

Full story.

Last year: Scripting engine with no OpenGL binding.

Now: The below + physics, GUI, sound engine etc. Somewhat better chances of coming up with something playable, I guess… 😉

David

I made a somewhat longer post being more elaborate about the whole project on my blog.

Go check it out NOW! 😀

Spacehunter Introduction

Woah! Not-so-niftyness!

Welcome to moving squares and a HUD.. thingy.. I still.. need to properly implement!

The family friendly game!

There’s the player (green square), the walls (dark brown square), a chest (violet chest-square thingy) and the HUD (the rest of the screen)!

That’s it. Back to work.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2011 at 2:22 am and is filed under October Challenge 2011. 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 managed to prepare my app for submission to the intel appup store.

I first had to figure out bugs: Sound doesn’t work. Also fonts don’t work. This was very disappointing considering that I’ve been working with a musician on sound effects and music. So we’re not able to use any of that work we did until they fix sound. I even tried to use a flash based sound player, and use the embed tag. None of it worked.

Also the lovely font we selected does not work. Trying to use a font-face crashed the browser completely. So instead I had to use ‘Arial’. arg.

I’m not sure what sort of html5 games and apps they expect if fonts and sounds aren’t working?

It seems they are using a 1 year old webkit implementation, so I hope they will upgrade their encapsulator soon. One year in web browser years is about 70 human years.

Anyway, we decided to submit the app anyway. The font makes it look a bit ugly, and without sounds it looses a lot – but at least the game play works.

Then I filled out a few pages of forms, prepared images, wrote copy, and did all sorts of guff so that I could upload the app. For some reason they required silverlight or google gears to upload the file (weird). Not sure why they couldn’t use a normal html upload form, or even a flash upload form.

Anyway… all that got done until I had to apply for a security certificate to sign the files. I fill out another form of my personal details, press submit and I’m greeted with a great error message: “An error has occurred. -1”

Oh well. Sent off an email for support, and now I wait.

Finally blocked after a couple of long days and nights – stopped by the error “-1”.

The dialogs used to be like this:

And now they are like this:

What you guys think?
I’m also thinking of trying Desura too, on a desktop format, I hope they accept my game

I would like to participate in the October challenge, and make a completely new game. I started an engine and then I thought, “I don’t think this game will actually go anywhere”. And “Games that get money fast are simpler, arcade style, and pixely”. So, I decided to stop working on the engine. And before I begin think up some concepts for another game, I was wondering if anyone would like to join my quest in a miny dev team. I work in FlashDevelop with FlashPunk Library. If you seem interested to do a project this month, comment. Also, to be specific, I am not looking for a co-programmer, I am looking for someone(s) good at pixel art, thinking up concepts together and making Music.

9 days in, and this is where I’m at:

Currently, the plan is to get path-finding working, and then getting the rest of the game logic in place (Win conditions, objectives, combat, etc).

Well, I have a temporary menu up and running… and it is smooooooooth…

Random menu link

I know I said this last year, and all the other LudumDare compo’s that have been on since then but now I’m finally getting into programming again (or really starting now). I have been using Corona SDK for creating iPhone games but have decided to move off it it due to the iPhone Developers Licensing fees and all the money involved, and have moved onto Unity!

I’ve been following a few tutorials, with no Java knowledge, and I’m glad at how it’s turning out and how simple Java is and how simple it is to use it in conjunction with Unity. So I have gotten a group of peope together, where we all learn different languages and tools and make games and I am making the first one to be sold. Not sure how I will sell it/earn money yet, but I’m leaving htat to last, probably using Kongregate or something simliar.

Expect more posts from me soon on the progress of my game!

It’s like I’m an all powerful force, able to stop time at a whim. Fear not from incoming doom, for time shall be rewound for one more attempt to evade your fate. Or perhaps you’d like to go home or be deaf from the horrors of the world. Fear the menu’s almighty power!

*going crazy with boredom making menus

Well, I may have screwed myself for the october challenge. I decided to change projects. I decided that a brainfuck interpreter for iphone is retarded, and no one would want to use it. Well maybe there are a few people. The other problem was that my core programming interface was really bad, and it was hard to enter programs. I just couldn’t bring myself to work on it more.

I decided to resurrect an old project that I never released. Itch is a partial clone of scratch for iOS. I wrote a bunch of it way back in the day, and even have videos and stuff. There were a few problems with it. One big one was that I never implemented saving, so it was a pain to work with. Another was that a bunch of the interesting opcodes were hidden in an arb opcode. Yet another was that I was paranoid about both apple and the scratch team, on one hand apple was way more strict about interpreted code, and on the other I didn’t really understand code licenses, and was afraid of the scratch one.

No longer! I have started rebuilding the project, and have a pretty good stab at it going after one weekend of work. I am probably just going to include the logo / turtle ops this time around, and leave the interactive and sprite drawing for another time. If I have time I might throw in some sound opcodes. To see.

In all likelyhood, this will make me miss the october deadline. I will try my hardest, but if I don’t make it, at least I am not putting out something that I think is a bad idea down at the core.

Pitch: Negative Space, the video game (with a hint of MSPaint).

Concept – taking up the gauntlet thrown down by the critically-acclaimed video game development studio Treasure and their esteemed framework “Ikaruga”, Ghost Police is an experiment in the expansion, destruction and possibly protection of parallel worlds. Following on from the “Negative Space” game-play mechanic/s devised by video game designer/entrepreneur Sean Howard, Ghost Police tasks you with commanding ships of clashing natures in a monochrome battlefield that both fighters are ill-equipped to survive alone.

Product so far – enclosed is an engine test that allows the player to either use One Ship or Two – One Ship mode lets you ‘flip’ between black or white on the spot at the right-click of a mouse, while Two Ship switches control between either fighter and asks you to blaze the trail ahead for your partner. Currently the level design is functional at best and no scoring, damage or enemy system is yet implemented, but the player is given free reign over the bullet brush – scroll the mouse wheel to adjust the size of your ‘ink’.

Demo v0.3

IN PROGRESS:

• four-colour palette allowing for complexity in conflicting backgrounds – clear and iconic, not muddy and confused
• original chiptune music
• three levels and boss fights
• Minefield mode – encouraging the player to navigate an 8-bit wasteland in search of treasure and traps

I iced my ‘Ship’ project. Stuck it in the carbon freezing machine. I’ve decided it was too large in scope for one month. The good news is that I’m not giving up on the challenge, and the even better news is that I’m not doing a 180 degree turn. It’s more like a little detour, a side trip, and pretty much 90% of what I have already completed can be used in the new project.

The paused project is a side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements and an open world similar to The Legend of Zelda. The problem with that is generating the content. Way too much work for one dude and a computer in a small time frame. I’d like to come back to the project sometime, as I think it would be fun to actually be able to spend time designing levels instead of rushing through to complete them in a semi-arbitrary deadline like the end of the month. I felt that it was best for myself to drop it early instead of pushing through and not having any time for a backup plan. Though, now with a third of the time gone, I will have to redouble my efforts.

The new project will be more of an arcade platformer. I envision Donkey Kong and Pac-man. Single screen (or close to it) levels. Sounds good in theory. We’ll see how implementation goes. I should be able to have a prototype set up in a day or so, and maybe a screen shot. We’ll see if it’s entertaining and what kind of tweaks I should make to raise the fun factor.

A quick MSPaint mockup. You run around and collect stuff to unlock the goal, while avoiding the boss attack and his minions.

As some of you may know by now I’m setting a goal of making 12 games by the end of 2012, basically one a month.  To facilitate this I set myself a task of coming up with 36 game ideas that I could turn into possible one-month games.  Now I need to decide, and I would like you to help me.  I’m going to go for two rounds, the first round I want to get it down to 24 game ideas, and then finally get it down to the 12 I’m actually going to use.  I will use the ones that receive the most votes.  So I would like to ask you all to vote in the comments and pick the 24 ideas you think could most likely be done in a month and you would think would be fun.  Just by writing down 24 numbers for the ideas you like.  I will wait a week for the first round, and then create a new list of the top 24 games that were voted on (even if they only get a few, I will still do it).  Then I will narrow it down even further, later.  Since this post is going to be long I’m going to put a page break here.  Please read the whole post and vote.  Thanks.  (If I get enough votes quick enough I might even try to get one of these games done for the October Challenge).  Most games will be played on a single screen, which means it’s going to be non-scrolling.  If there are any scrolling games the level will be randomly generated.  Please click “Read the rest of this entry”.

1. Turret Gunner – Your goal is to clear the playfield of all enemies by shooting them from a turret in the center of the screen.  The enemies come from all directions.
2. City Defense – Your ship is the only thing standing between you and the destruction of your city.  Destroy a mothership above before it destroys the city below.
3. Space Gem – Collect gems on various planets, avoid robots that move up, down, left, and right, while you can move diagonally.  This is not a maze game (like Pac-man).
4. Space racer – Try to get the best lap times in your racing space-ship.  Try to avoid black holes and supernovas.  Use warp pads and worm holes to help you.
5. Dog Show Obstacle Course – There’s a dog show coming up, so you need to pick a breed and teach it to walk through a doggie-obstacle course.
6. Laserpath – Arrange mirrors to fire a laser at a target
7. Deep Sea Treasure Hunt – Swim underwater to find treasure, avoid dangerous sea creatures and pirates.
8. Egg Catch – Using an egg carton move it along the bottom to catch eggs falling from hen houses at the top.
9. Star Catcher – Use your catcher which looks a bit like a dream catcher, to grab stars to get energy to open a wormhole to the next level.  Avoid shooting stars.
10. Tracer – Trace squares on a random grid to mark the squares.  Mark all the squares to move to the next level.  Beware baddies also on the tracer lines.
11. Tunnel Flyer – Try to navigate a treacherous cave tunnel, and shoot anything that moves.
12. Gemfall – Match-4 falling block game.
13. Bubble Blower – Blow bubbles and gain points for how long they last and how high they go until you run out of soapy water.
14. Paddle Ball – Hit objects arranged in rows 3 times to remove them with your paddle and your ball.
15. Long Tails – Eat objects with your snake to grow it’s tail and try to make your opponent crash into your trail.
16. Miner – Dig in a mine to uncover gems until a timer is done.  Then with another timer try to collect as many gems as you’ve uncovered.  Bonuses for uncovering and collecting all gems.
17. Cops and Robbers – You’re a police man trying to catch multiple bank robbers and put them in jail.  Run around platforms to catch up to them then take them to jail at the end of the platforms.
18. Circle Pong – Keep a ball in the center of two rotating circular paddles.  Score points for bouncing off each paddle.  Try not to let it fall out of the circle.
19. Chicken – Figure out how to get the chicken to cross the road, either walking, or riding on something.
20. Flood – Try to jump on platforms to escape a rising flood of water, see how high you can get.
21. Conveyer – Try to exit a room full of conveyer belts, and try not to fall to the bottom where certain death awaits.
22. Escape 2048 – Collect energy balls in a maze in the complex of an evil scientist who built killer robots and use the energy to shoot the bots.
23. Exploding Bumper Cars – A demented clown has taken over the bumper cars in a carnival and rigged them to explode.  Try to ram your opponents to get them to explode before they get you.
24. Hangman – Only instead of the traditional hangman picture, try different ways to die or lose, and create some cool winning animations.
25. Speedjig – Assemble a jigsaw puzzle as the puzzle pieces are falling from the top.  Get one puzzle piece out of place and lose a life.
26. Gold Runner – Run around a room with platforms and ladders and collect gold.
27. Escorter – A ship is moving around the playfield and your goal is to escort it to safety by clearing the space of mines and ships.
28. Alien Abduction – shoot flying saucers as they come down to pick up people walking on the ground, otherwise tractor them until you have safely rescued the humans.
29. Wall Ball – Another paddle and ball game. Bounce the ball on the upper wall to score, make sure not to lose the ball.
30. Something like pinball – Use flippers and bumpers to rack up a high score depending on where the ball touches.
31. Tank Command – Use your tank to destroy an enemy tank.  You can only shoot one bullet at a time.
32. Bomber – You’re a WWII bomber and you’re trying to destroy targets below by dropping bombs on them, avoid cannons on the ground and enemy fighters
33. Animal Hunter – Try to shoot wild game for food ala Oregon Trail, but make sure the animals are in season and that you don’t shoot endangered species.
34. Polar Squishers – You’re a seal trying not to be eaten by polar bears.  Get rid of the polar bears by squishing them between two blocks of ice, using your nose to slide the blocks across icy platforms.
35. Pod Shooter – Direct a moving “pod” into the open spaces of a maze, and shoot your opponent by touching energy fields.  You can’t move the pod yourself but must change direction when you’re allowed to.
36. Classic Board Games – Checkers, Chess, Go, Parcheesi — Would possibly make this as one game, might not be doable in a month.

Here are the game ideas.  If you have any questions feel free to ask.  Please vote on the 24 most likely to be done in a one-month period and the ones you’d most like to play by listing the numbers in a comment.  I will wait a week unless i get a lot of votes early.  Thanks!

I’ve been playing with Stencyl in the past few days, and I’ve decided that I will make a practice game.

I decided to check out Stencyl because I’ve thought for a long time that I don’t like point ‘n click game development tools. After trying Stencyl, I’ve decided that I was wrong; Stencyl is loads of fun!

So, the practice game.

The premise is this: Two adventurers are delving into a dungeon to defeat a dragon. You switch between the two and try to get both to the exit of each level. The character you aren’t using at the moment is guided by AI and you can give commands to the other character, as well.

There are two characters: A guy who can throw things and a girl who can wall-jump. They are used together to solve puzzles and navigate the levels. Their abilities will factor into the final boss battle, as well. They also each have a sword and a shield.

I’m hoping to have this done by Sunday night.

Peace, love, and inspiration,

— Henry

(Edit: Quick spelling fix)

I always wanted to make my SEUCK remake into a touchpad app, so you can create games ON your iPad/Touchpad. Now that I have my HP touchpad and development is so much faster and easier, I started finishing it.
I hope to bring it quickly enough to the market to get a $ from it. I also hope that people are willing to buy it.

Plan is to make a touch-only GUI to create full games and make an exporter so you can “sell” the created games for iPhone and WebOS phones (Pre2,3, Veer…)

I also plan to bring at least one proper game as a reference/tutorial.

Current status: It’s working pretty much with touch input only.
I added a lot of ace features like:
-shots/players/enemies have “elements”, so water can attack water and such
-I plan to bring powerups
-I need an option screen for the controls of the mobile devices

GACK sprite editor

Here’s a new video! Some new features! Still bare & incomplete!

1. Tone change code
2. Surrounding terrain
3. Texturing
4. Lighting
5. Menus
6. Game modes
7. Volume change code

Yeah I don’t think this will happen by the end of October but I’m going to keep trying. I’ll probably post a video once 1 and 7  are complete.

I’ve been thinking: Why did I decide to start a new game instead of improving on an old one? Why did I decide to make the new game in a language I rarely use, using a library I’ve never used before?

Answer: For the challenge! I decided to use FlashPunk, and put my game up on Kongregate to try to get the & through ad revenue.

I’ve got very little done, but here’s the basic idea: You will be presented with various building/landmarks/monuments, and will have a short amount of time to deface them with spraypaint. As of now, drawing works, and so does switching nozzle sizes of the can. That’s about it. :p

I just managed to sort one of my problems while trying to implement tone changing code. It turned out that I forgot that using every second character from a string containing sound data doesn’t give you just the left channel, well not in a 16 bit stereo file. I used the excellent audioop library, that comes with python, to split the data and now it’s playing seemingly correctly although incredibly fast.

Oh well better get back to sorting this problem out.

It turns out my filter had something to do with the previous speed problem and not using it doesn’t seem to affect the sound in any other way so that’s gone. Now it just skips and jumps a bit which is annoying, that may be down to my calculations of the duration and time stamp of the returned sample or because doing real time ffts is too demanding.

Alright guys so not much has changed since yesterday. All I have been working on is the overall scenery and esthetics of the main town. I had created all the weapons earlier today but I later got the blue screen of death and so i lost my work of weapons. Luckily i do still have the textures ready made. Here is a snapshot of the town. The waterfalls in the background are animated textures.

Next step? More towns, Complete weapons, armor(Coming soon!), ranged weapons etc.

My previous post was about starting and choosing between finishing my LD20 entry (link) or possibly my failed LD21 experiment for the October challange. Based on that i originally thought that my LD21 idea deserved more work, that the LD20 game would have “half” the work done by just porting and that i needed “app store experience” i went with planning to make the LD20 game for October challange.

Work went fairly well and as of today i was a few days behind but i had put a lot of time to spare at the end of my schedule, i also figured out a great idea for updated iOS controls and a bit of a difference in the gameplay to make it more accessible. Great so i go out on app store to what the price point of similiar games is… and what do i find at the top of the paid charts but this game that was released on the 6th of october!

Now this isn’t exactly the same game i was going to make but the similarities are close enough that i suspect that my game would have been dismissed as yet-another-clone. (My game would have been more towards a classic RTS with controls more reminicent of flight control and a bit more “realistic” gameplay)

So where does that leave me? Well i could try finishing the game for Android instead, betting that they don’t have an Android port hitting soon and doing something on Android for the very first time. Or i’ll cut it and go for making the LD 21 game or some other idea. I’m still open to input and am heading to bed now to sleep on this, but right now i’m heavily leaning on dropping the current game and plan, but do i really have anything better to do? Got some conceptual ideas around the LD21 experiments and old mini-LD ideas but not concrete enough and nothing that immideately says “great game”.

I’ve been working hard to complete the october challenge using my LD21 game Escaparazzi, and one of the steps was to enter it to a game dev contest.

Now I need your help, one of the judging phases requires public voting, so I was wondering if you could spare a minute of your time to go to the contest webpage and click “like” (highlighted in red), in return, you’ll get my eternal gratitude 😀

(also you can play the latest version of the game using the button highlighted in green)

So it turns out ffts on the fly is no problem, a quick check with timeit suggests I should be able to do around 1500 a second of the size I’m trying to do and I only need to do two per frame ie about 120 if we’re locked to vsync. The problem was that pyglet seems to take sound data twice as often as it “schedules” things if you set them up using pyglet.clock.schedule so I was giving two different data chunks for the same start time.

Hey guys, I’ve been realizing that I think there’s really not much more that I can do with Game Maker. I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions as to what platform I should move to next. Something similar to Game Maker but maybe a little more advanced.

Tags: game, maker

As we near our first milestone, OPifex Entertainment is almost ready to roll out our engine and begin building our game.  The concept and game design have been finalized, so all that’s left is to put the pieces together!

It’s a good thing our game Splat! is going to be relatively simple.  This allowed us to use the first half of the month to work on the Rough Edges engine, which is named after our next, much larger project.  The engine is built using SlimDX, which gives us easy access to the powers of D3D 10 and D3D 11.  While we take the slightest performance hit for using C#, we more than make up for it in development time.

Since most of the work is done by the engine, we’re going to use LUA to script the game into place.  Through the use of the engine’s powerful API, sculpting a game has never been more fun, or easy!  We highly recommend using the highest level tools available to you and your team’s skillset.  Development is fast, and more likely to be completed.  Using C# and SlimDX is our way of cutting out the headaches of most programming tasks while still holding complete power over our creations.

We’ve started some animations and other art assets, so here’s another teaser. This is blob man!

Blob Man Running from Garrett Hoofman on Vimeo.

We hope Splat! will be an exciting color mixing game that everyone can enjoy.  Keep a lookout for more frequent posts as the OPifex team starts the final sprint in the last few weeks of October. We wish you the best of luck, because remember, we’re all in this together

My name is Jim Peterman, and I am a video game music composer studying at St. Olaf College. I’ve worked with zillix a couple of times on Ludum Dare projects, and am looking to write more. I can write in a variety of styles, and have a large number of sound resources with which to supply a game. I am used to writing under a time crunch, and generally write a piece of game music in two hours. I only ask for money if you make money on the game.  Check out my portfolio:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Zillix/endeavor
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Zillix/p-i-g
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Zillix/summit (same music as endeavor)

If you are interested in working with me, email me at petermaj@stolaf.edu.

http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-scripts-for-app.html

Last and probably final update to my Hieroglyph-deciphering game.

http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/LD19/rosetta_v8.zip

Replaced handwriting with a font, tweaked puzzles, added some sound and various other changes. More info in the TIGS forum thread.

Tags: Egyptian, Rosetta

We finally decided give the first step and declare our intent to to enter in the October Challenge. More info about our entry after the link:

http://rs.gam3dev.com/2011/10/13/declaration-of-intent/

Sup Guise,

I’m the new guy, hello.
I read about this ludum dare thing every now and then but always thought I’m too much a wuss for it but now, I oddly received some guts and I’m doing this for the compo.

It’s my first shot so I guess I will fail bravely, but fkcu who cares. Anyways here’s some art:

You might guessed it, it will be a mobile game

It will be very simple without a story. You have to kill your enemies and reach the exit.  Period.

I’m heading for the android platform. I ever done some game development but never released anything at all. Therefore I build on existing codes, I read that this is not a problem.

Therefore I will have something playable soon. Everbody with a android phone is invited to check it out.  I believe I can shove it into the web, too. So a phone will not be mandatory to play it.

So far, thanks for reading. | -__- |

Well, I followed the last Ludum Dare, the escape one, after someone posted Notch was doing it on my D.I.C.(I’m not a fanboy). At the time my power cord had severed and I did not enter. So this Make Monies compo came out and I thought in the back of my head(“Maybe I could do that? I’ve already got a few proto’s in the system”).

So after some work on a 2D Action-RPG I’ve got in the pipeline, I figured I would revisit a game I had made earlier in my attempts to learn game programming. The game would be Petris, Tetris(tm) but using pentominoes instead of tetrominoes. I had the idea after playing many hours of Tetris(tm) on my cellphone, and thinking it’d be fun with another subset of bricks.
I’ll try to insert the youtube video below Petris

So, last year I tried the challenge and I guess I won, sort of, but sort of not, because I never really finished the game.

I’m doing another attempt at the game except going overhead instead of isometric and using the aesthetic of an old LD game I made “Escape from Anathema Mines” instead of the one I was doing ..

Anyway, here’s a screenshot. I’m doing brute-force ray casting here and it works great. It’s really nice to be targeting the desktop using C, so I can do stuff like that. (The older LD version was in python so I had to code it smart, and if I were targeting mobile I’d have to be more optimized.) Anyway, my goal is to have this game selling on the Mac App Store before the end of the month for a few bucks.

-Phil

P.S. I coded up some crazy tile generator to get all the wall contours Yay for python!

Here is a game I have been working on for the last year.  It has some problems on windows with the menu titles.

http://script-blocks.googlecode.com/files/ScriptblocksAlpha13.zip

This Video Explains it

Its open source and I’m still not sure how I want the game play to work.

If you want to help me succeed in the October Challenge you can donate here

http://code.google.com/p/script-blocks/

Here is a more complicated creation

Thanks,

Greg

Hi all! It’s my first time here. For my entry I have something so simple it feels silly to post it here with you pros, but I am happy to have finished something. It’s my HTML/Javascript implementation of the card game “memory.” The game is timed so play quickly.

Find the matches as fast as you can!

I’ve placed it in the chrome web store but if you’re not using Chrome you can just follow this link.

My goal is to guide traffic from the Chrome web store through my game to my new iPhone application Go Time that will be available at the end of the month. I’m not sure how I’ll quantify success in the contest–but hopefully the cross promotion will do some good.

The level maker is now (mostly) usable, other than a few missing graphics buttons and the ability to add powerups to planets/stars. You can make a level, test it and save it. There are no screenshots because it doesn’t look that different yet.

I suspect I will have a working version to share this weekend. Meanwhile you can play the ld21 version here or get a more polished version from the android market.

I post regular updates on my blog and I work hard on my game so you must understand that not much time is left for me to post regular news here so I’ve sent my courier to bring news from the front up here to the Ludum Dare.

“Last time you could see the very first quick video preview of me lurking around the crypts. My creator wants you to know that there have been nice progress since then. Here’s the list of the new additions

• Stone switches
• Doors
• Random mice waiting in the holes to cross your way
• Player art done for 4-way movement + torch animation
• Pickups implemented (yeah, treasure for you!)

That’s it for now but if everything goes well, there will be another video preview from the crypts tomorrow, so stay tuned!”

Tags: Courier of the Crypts

Oh well, progress seems slow. I didn’t got done what i wanted to do, but i got other stuff fixed and implemented.

Anyways, here’s the update!

The solar system is fine for now, the transition to the level is terrible though.

The level itself is rather boring currently. I will add more content for that in the next week.
More enemies, more weapon types, more everything!

I think i made a pretty solid base to advance on, so the interesting parts can be added bit by bit now

Okay so about a month ago now there was ORCAJAM2 and it was awesome. Some of us took turns making 5-minute games (highly recommend you try that, it’s also awesome). Anyways for the October Challenge I’m currently working on a full version of that 5 minute game. Because I had to make a game in 5 minutes I used Game-Maker, and I’ll be continuing with it since I’d much rather have a good time and actually have a finished product than learn something new…. again. Anyways, you’re a little submarine, going around caves, and you can’t see nothing. So you have to fire little depth sound torpedo things to see with. Yeah. It looks more fun than is sounds and it definitely plays more fun than it looks.  Anyways, I’ll just cut to the chase and link to the gameplay video. (you should make sure you watch in 720p fullscreen if you want to actually see anything).

Submarine game test

I’d post a screenshot but it’s not really a game that lends well to still images. So yeah! Basically I just need to refine the controls right now. Then from there I decide if I want this to be some slow-paced strategically  benighted maze, or if I’ll just ditch the lighting and go for something faster paced. And then I make levels. And then Menus. And then I try and figure out how one sells a GameMaker game!

I just realized that this is something Ludum Darers might care about and I better mention it here quick!

Yesterday on Twitter @bentosmile asked why there is no Pirate Kart for the IGF competition. (The Pirate Karts are compilations of tons of tiny games that we’ve done a few times now over at Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com)

This was a VERY GOOD QUESTION.

So we are making one! All games welcome!

Here’s the event page over on GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT COM. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/1966 with a little bit of a FAQ.

If you would like some of your games (made for a Ludum Dare or otherwise) to get into the IGF COMPO FOR FREE as part of this, send ‘em over via email: <mike at meyermike dot com> !!! (you might want to mention how I should credit you if it isn’t immediately obvious from the sender name) If this wasn’t so last minute we’d have set up some kind of submission form and tried to gather screenshots and descriptions, but even though this is kind of half-assed I think it’s a wonderful thing!

Deadline-wise: I’ll try to get everything in I can, but there’s conversion work I need to do for a bunch of them so as we near the IGF submission deadline on Monday night the odds of making it in get lower and lower. So try to get it to me by Sunday night if you can!

We have a lot of games already! I lost count somewhere around 120!!!

Spread the word!

So, I remade a game I made in Game Maker, and polished it (over Thursday and Friday this week), and it is now in the submission process to the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. My strategy to earn my $1 from the game is to get ad revenue. (Wish me luck)

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Worm Hole is a free single player arcade game.

Objective:
Travel along the worm hole (which looks suspiciously similar to a space rainbow) without hitting its sides for as long as possible with your space ship.

Also, my friends want me to write it for Android, but I will only be doing that in November after exams.

For those who don’t know, I’m making a graffiti game called Deface. The goal is to spraypaint various buildings and monuments in an attempt at a highscore.

As you can see from the above picture, I have a (mostly finished) title screen. The menu completely works, and I’ve added all the colors of spraypaint that I want to have for now. The actual spraying of the paint even works, with three different nozzle sizes.

My next item of business will be to add images of buildings, etc to paint.

Here, the second development video preview is out. You can see all the new additions that I’ve done since the last video preview. Why don’t you take a look? It will cost you less than a minute 😉

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py47WnazJYs

Follow the development at my blog

2 weeks ago I presented my project for the October Challenge: selling the first copy of my “multiplayer game making tool” CraftStudio, by the end of the month.

CraftStudio is built in C# using XNA and Lidgren. The client runs on Windows only (for now!). The server runs on pretty much any platform with Mono support.

People have been building & painting some dragon models to try and see if the modeling tools are good enough to build a complex model. And to see if we could do better than Notch :P. Here’s one of them:

A dragon model by @schouillette

So, what have I been up to code-wise?

• Spent a lot of time improving model editing. There are now transform handles which allow editing models by dragging stuff around. I had to go through lots of matrix & projection stuff, but it was worth it :).
• There’s now an integrated news system in the client. It pulls news from the master server (which itself gets them from a SQLite database).
• Lots of improvements to the UI framework: smooth scrolling, text layout performance improvements, splitters to allow resizing panes, etc. The whole framework is available on Codeplex under the MIT license. Feel free to use it for your own projects!
• Mostly importantly, I’ve been working on map editing support for the better part of the last two weeks, and I just made a new release available. See for yourself:

An alien space ship map

Since I’m now working full time as an indie, I’ve also started working on setting up a company, but it looks like it will take some more time.

I have looked at payment processing platforms too. I’d love to go with Stripe.com which has awesome developer support and, it seems, a great team behind it. Sadly they won’t be available in my country (France) by the end of the month. I could go with PayPal but I’ve read multiple indie horror stories with selling unfinished products (Minecraft and Project Zomboid, to name a couple). If anyone has advice on this, I’d love to hear it!

Tags: craftstudio, game tool, multiplayer, october challenge

http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/10/notes-on-chome-and-android.html

Also… beta testing intel app up apps.

…Is operational and online, and located here:

http://software.o-o.ro/urth-level-editor/

Lord Kitchener Wants You*

 To make levels!

But seriously, I’d appreciate feedback on the monster.

You can currently make and test levels and save them online. Loading other levels will become available in the next few days for testing purposes.

______________________

*Lord Kitchener doesn’t really want that, but I do 😀

Tags: editor, progress update, urth

I started out with an good idea that became a great idea as i progressed, then discovered that the great idea was already an old idea and decided to put down that project. The feeling after that was that sure i can come up with great ideas but doing this idea right now felt more or less pointless. So for the past 5 days now i’ve been half-motivated and a tad annoyed at not having any of the other ideas go “yeah” in my head (Sorry everyone on IRC). I have been working on my LD21 game idea but it was a far bigger project that i didn’t feel like i could do justice in this short time so it was kinda half-hearted.

Anyhow a friend started brainstorming with me and something just clicked, got a really great idea and i’ll let you people know more as i make progress (Got about one week on my own schedule to finish now).

Working hard on Constant Sail: Pirates & Traders for the October competition. It is a pirate game where you sail around a world and trade goods. It is multiplayer and web based with a big emphasis on PvP fighting.

As you can see, even though I am making this for the web, it is being formatted to also work well on smartphones.

It uses jQuery Mobile + Node.js + MongoDB

Hopefully I get it out in the next week and get someone to upgrade in time to qualify.

Posted here on google+

VERY, VERY IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE:

I have to do a full citation!
Please send me an e-mail to richard.blechinger@hotmail.com, include your FULL NAME, OR your FIRST NAME and the FIRST LETTER of your LAST NAME, i.e “Johnny M.”, if you want to be kept anonymous.

Anything IDE or programming language related can be posted HERE.

That’s it. Now you can read the rest of the article.

You have 2 weeks.

Post anything you know about “indie”, answers to common questions, opinions, and more, I can convert any data.

• Do you think you could live off your hobby?
  Your definition of “indie” vs. “AAA”,
  Post-Mortems,
  Success (or terrible failure),
  Which language you use,
  Which IDE you prefer,
  Indie-Magazines,
  Articles,
  Games (Windows, or Flash/HTML5/Java),
  Examples of random code snippets (Commented if possible, please)
  ANYTHING.

It doesn’t have to be all too technical, because my classmates aren’t exactly computing geniuses. (Some random commented code snippets are okay, though. Just for showing them what’s going on behind the scenes)

Also, if I meet any of you on IRC while I’m slacking, I may ask stuff :p

There you go, bombard me, LD-Community!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 10:47 am and is filed under LD - Misc, Uncategorized. 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.

It’s time to introduce you with the new toy that courier will have fun with in the crypts. The one and the only….”Burning Urn”!  <tan-tan-tan-tan-stshhh>

On your quest trough the crypts, you’ll find urns filled with oil. You can light them up and throw them trough the hallways. You can use it to scare lurking danger away or even burn it to ashes. Should you be scared of the darkness in the next room, throw one of these inside and you’ll know what’s there waiting for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cltpNN5zxGc

“Burning Urn” spam is a bit of exaggeration, I know but it won’t be possible to throw those so quickly one after another…it won’t be wise anyway.

Tags: fun, preview, video

So, here’s my level editor thing. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to set up the level entrances / exits / pathways throughout the level. Sort of some kind of cryptic code system. I’m not sure how complicated I want it to be. Depends on if I will have the level editing open to the general public or not.

That said, I think I want it to be editable by normal people. So I think I’ll probably pass on using those weird codes. But at least now I have those cool hex icons for no reason.

-Phil

Making game is living life inside life.
After work, the game maker reveals from the pain and his human fears become the rage of pixel enchantment… sigh :p

Below the game introduction of the level 2

A few days ago I posted calling for entries into the 2012 IGF Pirate Kart compilation to be entered into the Independent Games Festival Main Competition! Now the Pirate Kart is all put together and uploaded!

[stextbox id=”download” color=”000000″]Get it at http://www.piratekart.com/!!![/stextbox]

319 games by over a hundred people! Quite a few Ludum Dare games are in it!

Thanks so much to everyone who contributed games and helped compile them! The process went much more smoothly than I ever would have expected it to!

Check it out! Play some crazy games! Maybe help seed the torrent!

I’ve decided to accept the October challenge by finishing my LD20 entry – the Clone Wolf. It’s a platformer where you simultaneously control multiple instances of a hero while fighting monsters.

In addition to the LD version, there’s a new display style (single-screen defense instead of side-scrolling), more content (complex bosses), tutorials, dialogues, a storyline and music (by a renowned Czech geek, who was awesome enough to let me use it just for a credit).

The game is made in flash (yay Flixel!), I’ll try to hit as many platforms and markets as I can.

Left on my TODO list: draw 5 level backgrounds, draw intro illustrations, fix a few bugs, create a trailer, make a few screenshots.

Box art:

I’m quite cautious about showing my games to other people, therefore I got to playtesting a little too late (just last weekend). After a short playtest it was evident, that without a tutorial, the game was confusing and unplayable. I sat down, rewrote the script, added more tutorial levels, redesigned a GUI.
Conlusion: even a short playtest session can reveal serious design flaws. Playtest, silly me! Playtest more!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLtoUfEw8XY&feature=channel_video_title

I’ve made some steady progress since the last post a little over a week ago, but I still feel as though I am a little behind where I should be if I want to get this out by the end of October. Pretty much all the systems are functional and I’m spending most of my time additional enemies and random features to increase replayability.

Stuff Added

• Leveling Up
• Bosses every 10 levels
• Time Remaining Progress bar
• Labyrinth Levels (Floors 10 – 20)
• Several new enemies

Stuff to work on

• Adding more enemies
• Adding more bosses
• Come up with a level type for Floors 20-30 and 30-40
• Adding cool stuff for the player to randomly encounter
• Audio

Here a couple screen shots:

The UI is a little busy right now (There are 3 progress bars), but I’m having a hard time coming up with a layout that I like. I’ll probably end up sticking with something similar to what it is now.

Tags: october challenge

I just submitted Haunted Hallway to the app store. Now I need to make a version for Kongregate for when the app releases. Here are a couple of screenshots:

So this week, as mentioned last time, i started adding some gameplay elements.

I started with a bit of enemy behavior. The floating spheres are now mines, that close in on your position once you get near them. I doubled their hitpoints so they need at least two hits to increase difficulty.
Also i added another enemy type: a beam turret. It aims at you and fire’s if you’re close enough. The aiming has a bit of inertia though, to make evasion possible.

Speaking of evasion: i realised the controls were rather quirky and not very fluid, so i decided to rewrite them and came up with a new control mechanic. Instead of your ship moving up and down you now pitch the nose in the desired direction.
This has two consequences:
Good: movement looks and feels smoother overall
Bad: Evasion is nigh impossible
So i added the [Shift] key to enhance the controls. Pressing it will now keep your current pitch locked (instead of automatically leveling it back to surface parallel) and you can roll up and down, or strafe, if you will.
This adds some nice depth into gameplay and allows some pretty neat dogfighting in this early stage of development already.

Furthermore i added item drops, just for the sake of implementing them. They currently serve no purpose, apart from a rewarding kching sound upon collection 😉

AND you have a new gun! LAZOR BEAMZOR PZZZWWWWEEEEEEEEW

Now without further ado, i present to you: Funky Ship part 5!

I’m currently trying to get Indievania to host my game, Petris. Over the last week I’ve implemented Marathon, Timed, and a 20 Line mode for Petris. Also the ability to save scores to a text file. Here’s the title and game screen:

Issues: I’ve got two things I’m worried about. 1-The blocks while playing the game don’t line up perfectly. 2-I use Java’s graphics to draw text, which makes it not look the greatest…

Goals: I plan on fixing the block issue in the near future, and try to learn bitmap text drawing. Also, maybe flesh out the bg music(wrote it myself). It’s 2 short parts that play over and over and might make other people go crazy. If people want the ability to switch polyominoe sets, I’ll try that too.

I have a new button that allows the users to insert or delete images, that are correctly updated in the animations and level-background lists then. Tiny feature but a lot of work.

The next great thing I added are “elements”. Each player/enemy and shot and “vulnerability” has a set of 4 elements to choose from. You can control what happens on collisions between player-enemy, player-shots, enemy-shots and so on with them. Awesome! I’m so excited.

The last step is to implement a small menu for customizing the controls and an export function that makes stand-alone Apps for WebOS, Android, iOS and PC, Mac, Linux.

http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/10/android-developer-store-problem-no.html

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 8:17 am and is filed under October Challenge 2011. 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 never really got to work on my October Challenge game, but today I met up with an old friend and artist. (http://pernillesihm.blogspot.com/) and we decided to do a game with imaginary friends!

It’s running great on the iPad and I’m quite happy with what we managed to do! You can find a web build here: http://timgarbos.dk/FallingFriends/ but the controls aren’t super great on pc.

Any feedback? Otherwise I think that we are pretty much going to submit it to the AppStore tomorrow 😛

A few screenshots:

This time I’m not here to showoff or to report what I’ve made in past few days but to seek your help!

As you might know, Courier of the Crypts will be a puzzle game with small amount of action mechanics. I want to ask you, what would you like to see in game like this one. Traps? What kind of traps? What about scarry moments that will throw you out of your chairs? Dancing coconuts? Everything! I want to hear everything that goes trough your mind.

I want to make this game as enjoyable as possible but I need your help here!

Woohoo!

My app Math Wars just got accepted into the iOS App Store 😀 It’s an educational app designed to help kids practice and improve their arithmetic skills. Free to play, but users can buy extra levels if they want. Hope people find it useful, it will give me something to write about in my college application haha (I’m 17)

Get it here

I thought I’d make a post here, since I’m making it for this competition!

The Not-So-Big Bad is a game where you play as the boss of an RPG, I love upgrades so that’s a huge thing in my game!

To win, you have to beat the highest level AI at the last location (upgradable, of course!), but you can get other awards also!

check out more at darkbirdgames.freehostingcloud.com

I decided to drop-out of LD October Challenge, due to the fact that I am not too far and another surprise project is coming up.

http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/10/getting-into-samsung-store.html

Does anyone have any recommendations for creating footage of openGL games on linux? I’ve tried recordmydesktop and xvidcap but I’ve basically wasted two days trying to get sound and a decent frame rate out of them!

A video of the current state of the game:

As promised, a gameplay video from one of the levels:

Tags: gameplay, video

It’s been quite awhile since I posted an update, so here I am!

I have added backgrounds to the title and other screens:

The Title

No, that’s not a face in the center, although it does look like one. (It’s graffiti, so I can pretend I can draw well 😉

Here is a picture of the gameplay:

Giving Liberty a 'stache

I’ve also added (basic, not quite finished) scoring, added help and credits text, and fixed a few things that I wasn’t happy with before.

Next up:

– Music

– Kongregate API

– Final tweaks/polish

Tags: Deface, update

So .. I’ve done a ton to the game in the last day or so. Got all the in game features working nicely and stuff. The most notable visual change is the addition of characters. Check out these lil’ guys! These are the same guys I used in the original “Dynamite” I made for pyweek like a million years ago. They work pretty well scaled down and tiny. Next up, I gotta add a basic save/load interface for my level editor and then start churning out levels and all that!

Oh, and I grabbed all the sound effects from Dynamite and Escape from Anathema Mines and added them into this game. Makes it feel a bit more lively! I’ve also added “data cartridges” that display text messages when picked up, I guess that’s the cheap way to give a game some vague story-line.

-Phil

UPDATE: Using my cool-sauce edge generation script, with just a few minutes of graphics work I can get a totally different look to my game. This is going to be super helpful to giving my low-budget game the appearance that it has art in it (maybe).

Weird and squiggly:

Fractalicious Puzzle Shaped:

Square:

I think with varying the user flashlight color and varying the floor texture I can probably get some really different feeling settings for the game to take place

-Phil

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 at 7:18 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2011. 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.

So I finally got a video made. It’s not particularly exciting but it shows off the main features so far: speed shift, pitch shift, reversing. The colours are picked at random because I haven’t got round to implementing anything more exciting yet.

Ludum Dare October Challenge 2011 – Gamplay Footage

Last 2 days i was fidgeting with my shader implementation, and i finally got it to a stage that is totally usable. The Text formatting is not perfect yet, and syntax highlighting would be nice, but i’m still proud of it.

So here’s my first devlog, although i felt a bit awkward talking to myself, but i guess i’m just not used to it.

Earlier today i was playing and recording some guitar, so here’s a new theme for the solar system.

wzl – desolate place

I’ll be refining it, and probably writing some more in the next couple of days

Does anyone have a list of places where we can announce our games?

What game websites can we announce on?

How about blogs?  Are there any game blogs that take submissions?

Are there any forums that like to hear about new games being released?

How about PAD file distribution?  I remember this was something useful to do years ago(2003 or so), but is it still worth doing?

Are press releases worth doing?

Places to announce games in the comments.  <– Please leave places to announce in the comments.

So, there was quite a bit of call for a revamped version of my Ludum Dare 21 game, with added music and other aesthetic goodies (and a bit more balancing & grammar checking)

So, yeah, it’s up on Kongregate, remade in stencyl, if you fancy wasting 10 minutes.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Mimicwing/tip-of-the-tongue

I just added Haunted Hallway on to Kongregate, you can check it out here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Uncade/haunted-hallway

ran into some major snares this past week.  Our animation system was all sorts of wonky… and unfortunately too many hours were spent trying to fix it.  However, as we’ve committed ourselves to the Ludum Dare October Challenge, we’re going to take another step “back” in order to speed up development time.  Our top developers are experienced with the XNA platform, so we decided to use XNA 4.0 in order to side-step our model and animation loading issues.   While we are not proud of this, our code monkeys already have an XNA engine up and running, including 3D sound, animation, and custom shaders.  So, all things considered, yay for XNA!

We’ve made some progress on our art assets as well.  We have two musical scores written, one for in-game and one for the menu.  We have our blob-man model fully animated, and (using previous game code) randomly generated planets for our blob man to run around on.  Finally, we’ve got this awesome logo for Splat!

As Halloween ticks ever closer, we wish everyone the best of luck!  The OPifex team is certainly going to need it this week

Okay it’s not actually my first game.  It’s the first 1-day prototype that I will turn into a single month game come January.

Not really October Challenge worthy but who knows it’s still October.

Wallball

Keep in mind is not really what you’d call a release-worthy game.  It’s just the bare minimum I needed to call the 1-day prototype finished.  The code is going to have to be severely refactored.  I’m going to have to add something in that will make it more gamey or something.  Obviously will need polish, high scores, etc and so forth.

I shout it on twitter : last weekend we did a game jam, and it was about time ! In a room full of boxes and a temperature a little too low to stay in it all night, we were two with our computers, and the third one was reachable at home on saturday afternoon. We didn’t know what we could do in 48 hours, and by the end of the day, we had more questions than ever, but we produced something not so small, and if you care enough to read, you’ll see pictures and the first video of the “Wildrose at Ski Camp” game.

No fun, no game – the idea

Saturday noon : all computers are installed and we just ate our first pizza (jam food !) : a hard and late start, but let’s begin ! We took the theme of the september Ludum Dare as we couldn’t participate last month and the october challenge has no theme : the october challenge is “make a game and earn 1 dollar with it”. Quite a challenge, but not restrictive about the game scenario : there’s more fun when there’s a constraint ! I won’t describe the whole afternoon but here’s the thing : at 5:30PM we had two prototypes made from the two main ideas that we came up with. Even if we did our share of paper design and brainstorming at the beginning, we needed those prototypes to face the actual fact : these are NOT FUN. Hell that’s a hard lesson to learn during the jam, but you can’t finish a game jam if the game you create is no fun. Without a good idea by the end of the afternoon, we almost thought the jam was compromised. But fortunately for us, our third team player would be reachable one hour later, and he would save the day !

The opposite of a tower defense – game type

A quick phone call and a few minutes later, three new detailed ideas were in competition. We discussed each of them and voted for our favorite : it came up from the “opposite” theme and another game that was a tower defense one, the idea is the following : what if the player does not build towers to defend its house but controls the incoming characters and must reach the house ? A tower attack ! After deciding also what characters we wanted on this game, what kind of environment, we started to explore the possibilities in this kind of game. We wanted to add a lot of features, tons of actions for the player, animation and cartoons every where, but it was saturday night, and there were only a day left ! So we decided to take the most important ones to have an actual game, and started to work on it.

Does it matter if it’s cold in the room ? – environment

I don’t know if this is a parameter, but the room was a little hotter the second day and we produced more stuff that day. And I can say more about that, talking about the landscape style of “Wildrose at ski camp” : it wasn’t the first idea but we went from a city landscape to a mountain landscape : does the temperature in the room influenced that ? I’m glad we came out with it : the game looks definitively cool (!) and is quite corresponding to the weather right now, and by the way, I like skiing (ok, that’s not even relative to the topic).

Let’s share the title – story

Aside from the game jam, the three of us are developing another game not released yet. It takes place within the little riding hood universe, her granny would be named Wildrose. I will share more of this game later on, but let’s focus on this jam game : the goal is to allow the wolves to bring flour bags to the grand mother Wildrose so she can cook pies. The player is able to do that by acting on the wolves snowboarding : stop them, make them move again or double their speed. Once beyond the ski-lift, they are safe and can throw the bag to the grand mother chalet, where Wildrose is cooking. So the title is simply taken from that : “Wildrose takes her vacation in the Alpes”.. well, let’s shorten that : “Wildrose at ski camp”, that’s better.

The return of the game type

We ended up on sunday evening, around 11PM, with a game that got a title screen and a playable game level that is also replayable as parameters change over time to increase the difficulty. Let’s take a break and watch what we got : a game that is FUN to play, so can we send it now ? Well… it’s not really a game jam that takes place on the weekend, so maybe if we could tweak a little bit more, add some features, it would be good ? The first question is : the gameplay has got somehow a feeling of a “déja vu”, but is it enough not to send it ?

The first video ever

Here’s the video of the actual gameplay, please tell us what you think from this video !

Wildrose at Ski Camp – YouTube

Woohoo! Yesterday the game was submitted to the AppStore  Let’s see what happens!

Here’s the description and screenshots that I submitted!

Icon:

Description:

For Flyp to reunite with his friends again, you have to move and rotate his friends to make sure that they land safely on Flyp’s boat.

It can be played as a single player game where you collect as many friends as possible or as a multiplayer game where you take turns. The person who lets a friend fall into the water loses the game.

Can you gather enough friends to have a party without letting any of them fall into the water?

Features:
– Get new friends!
– Can be played at any age!
– Play as one or more players!
– Feel happy with cozy music and hand-drawn art-style!

We recommend playing the game with friends on an iPad. It is simply way more fun!

Soon, on 30th of October, our clocks will shift from 02:59:59 a.m. to 02:00:00 a.m. so there’s actually 1 hour between 2:00 am and 2:00 am.

This is the best time in the year to make a game! Make a game in zero hours!

Fixed website, added submission form, FAQ, theme suggestions and all that! Go check it out!

PS. refresh cache! (Ctrl+F5)

EDIT:
I hacked together a tiny website that tracks tweets.
http://0hgame.eu/

I didn’t report much since the last video preview but there was progress. Among other stuff, I implemented the first enemy that will lurk around the cripts. Horde of ’em… For more updates on the Courier of the Crypts, read freshly written page 8 from my diary.

Next to that I’m afraid I won’t succeed in the October Challenge 2011 because I don’t want to rush with the development since there are still few features to add and I shouldn’t mention all the work around the main menu and maps that awaits for me.

I posted about how we arrived at ski camp yesterday, and I forgot one important thing to tell you : Why isn’t the game available yet somewhere ?

That’s indeed a very good question ! The reason is quite simple : I’m a little perfectionnist (that’s an euphemism) and I couldn’t just upload a version where there is still some tweaking to do before I find it entirely playable : mainly the difficulty progression has to be changed a little bit, but some other missing details as a “pause” button are not included as it was only one day of development. And finally this is a very special ludum dare challenge: the october challenge ! It’s not one weekend but a full month to release a game and earn One dollar with it (I’m not sure how exactly I can do that without releasing the game though ). In this particular case, we started last saturday evening and I think this game deserve a little more time before any release, but that will happen, I’ll make sure of that.
If I can have some opinion from the video and description above, that’s a plus, and I could even include some of your thoughts or remarks in the game, that is if it’s possible mainly, not only if I’m willing to do it.

Thanks to have read this so far  !

Tags: ski, wildrose

The ghastly death of Radus is a game for the October Challenge.

We are two to work on this project: me, the “artist-designer”, and my friend the “programmer-designer”. We are actually in High School, and we already worked together on games like Braudu. It is our first Ludum Dare participation.

This game will transcribe the life, or the death should I say, of Radus, a mentally ill person living his last moments of paranoia, which are horrible.

We will use StencylWorks to achieve it. I do not know where to sell it though, for the moment.

Dev Blog: The ghastly death of Radus

Facebook page: The ghastly death of Radus Facebook page !

Well, I’m still alive and… hacking! But time is running up, and I need to get back to work, so I’ll just link to the small blog post I just wrote over at Indie DB for now.

David

It’s not been easy, but the CW:P is out

Check out the game site for more info, try the game at Kongregate. It is made in Flash, so I’ve been able (after a bit of struggling) to roll out desktop installers for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

No sales so far, but it’s my first finished and commercially released game – a little personal dream becoming reality. Many thanks to my sweetheart for support and all the inspirative folks here, at TIGS forums and Flixel forums.

Good luck to all other fellow October Challengers!

A few notes on Adobe AIR
It has been my first desktop app made in Flash, a lot of new things for me:
1) Flash does not allow key controls in fullscreen mode, only AIR in desktop mode does
2) to create a native desktop installer, you have to build it using an AIR SDK on a target platform (luckily I have access to all three major platform systems) – to make a Win installer, you need to build it using a Windows SDK on Windows, etc.

Tags: flash, release, video

…but I will not despair. This challenge has showed me what it takes to make a game, both the fun and the frustrating parts, and I finally have something that I can turn into a real game. I am motivated to make this game the best I possibly can, and I will release, but the October deadline is simply too close. I’ve created a story, characters, a general theme, and have decided on a title, “A Fey Mood”. I-I’m going to post my progress so far here, and I’m going to set a new deadline for myself (as without one, I will never release).

This is an automatically updating link to my progress (at least that which I wish to make public).

My new deadline will be Christmas. I hope to see you all then!

So .. some fun stuff here!

I’ve added a level selector to my editor so I can start working on multiple levels in my game:

I’ve added zoom in / out into my editor so I can get the big picture of my layouts:

And I’ve added shadows to my characters so it looks nicer:

Not entirely sure if I’ll make the Oct.31 deadline, but I’m making quite a bit of progress. I’ll keep plodding along and see where I’m at in a few days!

-Phil

Just Entered Cancer Wars into the October Challenge!

Please play it and let me know what you think, because all ad revenue goes to Cancer Research UK!

Tags: Cancer, Charity, unity, Wars