I gotta say the theme hit me just a tad on the wrong side of mind. I’ve had a single idea running through my head that has connotations with several of the like-minded themes that were in the running – in particular criminals, thieves and finally escape. I really wanted to hit something within personal, intimate domains, but despite a lifetime of stories and experiences that would be phenomenal to present through an interactive medium, I simply couldn’t conjure mechanics that would convey it properly. Instead I’m gunning for what runs within the story of criminals and thieves, but with the purpose of escape – I hope it’ll run sufficiently within the theme for people’s liking

Anyway, I’ve been fighting with collision detection and vector transformations in FlashPunk (which I haven’t done before) – in retrospect a needless problem if I’d worked within those domains prior to the compo. This time around I’m focusing more on mechanics and much less on visuals. I’ll try and get by with a mix of minimal-frame 16-bit style character images in key places and let all actual interactive gameplay happen with bright colours and primitive shapes to make it easier to follow.

Although the design doc has about 7 distinct levels of gameplay types, I’m hoping to finish at least 3 (and an intro) within the weekend.

Here’s an alpha pick from the first gameplay section, tentatively titled “Hiding the Evidence”. A few debug sprites in there (if you can spot them). Ignore ’em.

I was unsure if i would have time and a good idea to enter, but i have something brewing in the back of my head and an idea about a look so i’m taking a stab at making it happen!

To make sure i don’t waste too much time if i’m going to fail i’m starting out with the hardest code now and if i finish that today i’ll be able to focus on game features tomorrow. (Yeah the wrong order but i don’t wanna spend too much time on art so i’m gonna try automating it)

Animated fella

/ Jonas Lund signing in

Tags: LD21

So I’ve decided to work on a game where you must stop the escape of prisoners (or some other type of person who would want to escape things), and after about 2 hours, I have this:

Now to work on collisions, while I think about exactly how to stop these people with orange hats from escaping

I didn’t think I was motivated enough but I just had an idea and now I really want to create that game

Ok, I have nothing to show yet, but by posting this I’ll force myself to work

Hi,

So this is my first attempt at ludumdare, I hope I can achieve something this weekend, I have begun work the past few hours but since it’s nearing lunch time I thought I’d stop and post.

I am going for something along the lines of a reverse dungeon crawl through procedural levels, basically escape to the surface.
I am using flashpunk for my work, I’ll post up some builds on my site shortly but for now here is a screenshot, so far just some basic level generation done with perlin noise.

Now it’s time to find some lunch, I shall be consuming 2 plain rustic roles with some double Gloucester cheese.

Started 3.5 hours ago, I’ve got a mockup and bit of code. Now I’m HUNGRY !

I’m not a big fan of taking pictures of food, but I don’t wanna be the compo pariah, this is probably the only one I’m taking anyways, as I tend to eat boring food like fruits and veggies.

Vegetarian pita pizza

Tags: foodphoto

To my great surprise I’ve gotten ahead of schedule as on my checklist of necessary features to make the game playable only remains one little thing.
I also got around improving the graphics (still very much WIP tho) which made quite an impact.

On the other side of things I’m running critically low on carbonated water and cigarettes which both are mandatory to get any coding done… Off to the shop I head and after that its time to add some new features to the game to make it more interesting.

(I’m starting to get little worried that the puzzle approach I took, doesn’t fit the theme so well after all as “escape” brings to mind hurry and haste and my game is rather relaxed even tho the main character is “escaping”)

And an updated screenie:

Screenshot 2

So I decided to create a Quick Time Event based game. For those who don’t know, a Quick Time Event is a game where one has to follow on-screen instructions, with information like what key to press, or what action to perform, in order to continue a sequence. A nice QTE modern game is Heavy Rain (see an example here).

In The Escapist, you are tied, caged, hidden, blinded (for a reason I’ll disclose later), and you have to try to solve all obstacles. The aesthetic of the game will be fuzzy sticks (because I can’t draw any better).

I give you a video as a preview.

Tags: escapist, screenshot

Bread rolls with Jamon Serrano (Spanish ham). Delicious.

Tags: foodphoto

Still working at the basics and at the concept, but some steps are already done like player movement and walking animation…
It’s now 13:41 in Germany.

So I didn’t update yesterday because I was, get this, sleeping. So, the real journey starts today. I’ll explain my concept when it hits me

Tags: journal

OK, so I’ve been doing some work on Starfire  and it’s reached the point now where I have a comfortably good story to integrate the theme in a rather backwards and unexpected way (I believe), and adding more features is mostly as simple as adding objects.

For example, I can now add an entire wave of new enemies with a loop and one ArrayList. I don’t need to change any other code to make that work in game. Oh how I love OOP.

Here’s the latest build for anyone interested in the storyline (no gameplay really, yet).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/38489921/Starfire.jar

– Jonno

Well, I have something! A name, game, story and this:

you see that wedge in the corner? That’s you. and soon, you’ll be able to move.

I wasn’t planning on joining but changed my mind after reading this post. It got me interested so I immediately made an account and here I am with my game project folder set up and ready to go.

Goodluck to everyone!

Here we go! I’ve had an idea that I believe not being as bad the others ! (I had thought about a colored space-shooter featuring the Nyan-cat… but that wasn’t really what I was looking for) So I came up with a ball game: you can only interact with it by placing obstacles which it will bounce off and the goal is to bring the ball to the exit of a maze…

Let’s code !

I’ve made good progress, I started with a fun idea, and Flixel is great for 2d platformers!

My idea: you, the essence of pure evil, have been put in a normal prison by the rather dim-witted forces of good. While the prison guards are mere men, they have been given a good supply of silver bullets!

All you have is an evil toolkit, which will probably contain dynamite and a collapsible rocket launcher, which you will have to use to fight your way past prison guards, machinegun towers and helicopter gunships.

So far I have a system to load levels from bitmaps, scrolling, a character with basic physics and wall jump.

Live build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/ld21/build.swf

Look at this piece of art! Amazing, huh? (not really, but whatever.)

Intro!

You actually can’t. There is no door! Ahh!

And now I have to go waste my entire day earning a living so my family can eat. This sucks.