Wow!! It’s so cool that it’s now 12 hours more, it’s exactly what I need to finish my game. Now after 20 hours of coding and drawings with only 4 hours of sleep the night before, I need to rest!! HERE is my entry so far, sorry that it’s only for windows. So good night to all of those who is going to sleep, and good luck to all of those that still working.

Hey ! First time to participate

For 40 min have problems to tryp so submit my work D:

So get my game “Catch One, Leave One” on this link !

http://www.mediafire.com/?nk9w18j2evo7sfn

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2976

This actually turned out pretty well… Though it wasn’t exactly what I was going for, and the sprites are rather unfinished, the game works well, and I’ll probably end up using this engine, or a modified form of it, for a variety of random games.

A door as envisioned by a post-modern programmer/artist

Ok, here is what happened since my last post.

[OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I was supposed to start working on the project yesterday after lunch but didn’t find the inspiration and was tired as hell so before writing a single line of code I took a short nap that somehow became a ~3hrs long sleep. I woke up around 6 PM and after coming back to my senses (around 6:30PM) I sat in front of the computer so I could start working on the game. I settled with Monkey as the programming language and made some progress with the code… but as the night fell I started running into some problems. I was not satisfied with the overall implementation of a few things and although I tried a few alternative ways I was not getting the results I wanted. My goal was to finish the game that night so I could spend the few hours I would have available on Sunday to make music/sound and better graphics.  Around 3 AM I discovered (by checking facebook) that DST  was to be resumed that night… so it was 1 hour later than what my clock was telling me. Having my time cut by my “little” nap and the damn DST, and frustrated because I was unable to achieve the results I wanted for the game, I decided to give up on the project.

I woke up this Sunday a bit before lunch, a bit depressed for having abandoned the project.

My sister entered my room and asked me about the competition and I told her I gave up on it last night. I remained on bed a few more minutes and then started thinking on my plans for the day.

I discovered I had nothing better to do, so after a few minutes, I decided to give it another shot at the project. I rescued the files from the recycle bin and started working on it again. Don’t ask me why I did that… I didn’t have a single reason to resume the project… in fact, it was quite unrealistic to even think it was possible to finish the game in the remaining time having already lost like 50% of the estimated time I had. But I was not in a hurry for finishing now… I was .. just curious to see how far I could go with it…

[/OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I actually got trolled by the clock. I checked the LD page and made my schedule according the remaining time it displayed. I should have grown suspicious that it was still telling me that the compo would end around 10:00 PM despite the DST, but I wasn’t thinking on the DST in that moment.

I managed to finish the game code around 8 PM, so I had like 2 hours to make some music. After trying a few programs from the LD tools page and realizing I didn’t have time to learn any of those I settled with composing the music with my DS (and the DS-10 Synthesizer) and record it on the PC with a stereo cable. It worked fine. I made the special FX with SFXR on my computer.

I wrote the sound manager module and then rebuilt the project. It worked fine except for one thing… background music was not looping. I tried a few things but given the time constraint I ended up giving up on it, leaving only the special fxs.

With like 40 minutes remaining until the end of the submission deadline I uploaded everything to my website and tried it on the browser.  It worked fine except for a minor thing… I was loading resources in the moment you need them, so the first time you face an open door, or any of the game screens, the game freezes for a second or so in order to load the image/sound. BAD.

I coded a quick and dirty image manager class that I could use to keep a cache of previously loaded images. Then replaced all loading calls for cache calls and added a few calls at the beginning of the code to cache the most heavy images (so they were already loaded from the start) and then uploaded the game again. Now it was working fine. As I didn’t write a cache for sounds you may miss a few sounds if they are too slow to load, but that shouldn’t affect the experience.

With only 18 minutes remaining until the end of the competition I finished uploading the game and submitting it into the compo. I was done.

I felt so relaxed that I kicked back and checked the IRC…. only to find that it was still 1 hour and 18 minutes until the end. Damn YOU DST!! LOL.

—————–

TL;DR? Managed to make the game. Don’t ask for the graphics as I had like half the time I was supposed to have (which was already around 1 day total). Had some problems but fixed them (although some compromises were done). Total time was around 8 hours including “art”, “sound”, and “music” (which was not included for technical reasons). Also, I’m bipolar.

HERE IS THE GAME!

P.S: You need to correctly avoid/enter 50 doors to win the game. Good luck with THAT!

Tags: compo, escape, journal, LD21, post-mortem

Submission page doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment. I’ll try again shortly.

my escape
controls: arrow keys and spacebar
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5333420/myEscape.html

I spent friday night and most of saturday apartment hunting, so I made my game in just over 24 hours.
I’ve definitely got some stuff to clean up, including letting you replay the game without refreshing the page 😀

Well I submitted my game.

The idea didn’t really come to me until Saturday night after I thought I just wasn’t going to get anything done at all.  Total time spent on this game was about 10 hours or so.  There isn’t much to it unfortunately, however the main premise of the game is expressed and it is playable.

It was alot of fun, now I’m looking forward to what I can accomplish next time with a full weekend of work.

If I could go back in time, maybe that’s what I should have named my Ludum Dare entry. Instead, though, here is “The ESCape”.

http://www.pxlgames.com/index.html

It’s a very ugly game and the first real game in HTML5 that I’ve gotten done so I focused more on handling the Canvas and Javascript than I did fancy sprites. The theme of the game is that you are an “Idea”, a white block navigating a “thought” maze. The player can use the arrow keys to navigate the maze and by pressing the Escape key, “change their mind” (aka, randomize the entire maze). The Idea is searching for various “Goals” though out the maze so that it can travel deeper and deeper. As the Idea travels into the thought maze, new obstacles such as grey permanent walls (was going to call them “Beliefs”, a la “beliefs set in stone”) and red “Doubts” (monsters) that randomly toss the Idea into another part of the maze. One the player gets through 20 levels, they get the ending I was, in my own heavy handed way, trying to convey.

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was a fantastic experience. I’m very very tired, learned a ton about HTML5/JS I didn’t know about (freaking inaccessible vars from setIntervals created within the object), and I am looking forward to participating in the next event and seeing the other submissions!

Here is my game.

Note:

I didn't have time to finish everything but, at the end (when you die) the game just closes.
 The game is Untitled because the rules never said that it needed to be titled.

 Story:
 The year is 4535. The earth has undergone encounter with aliens and has trapped them on a planet.
 The aliens have found a way to escape.
 Shoot down as many of them as possible.
 DO NOT LET THEM ESCAPE.
 
 Controls:
 Click to shoot
 
 Move with:
 WASD
 
 Download:
 http://www.mediafire.com/?l9sq23do1bb4ipf

Cheers.

Well, this was once again fun.

Agenda right now: SLEEP

Agenda later: A timelapse-video, I’ll upload the soundtrack, and see wheter that source-upload crashed again.

In the meantime, why don’t play a bit of Metal Sphere Solid? (it’s fun, I tell you )

LD-Entry

Web-Playable

-Matthew

Tags: 3dsmax, escape, max, unity, unity3d

Abstraball is done! You can find it here

It’s a top down 2D-turned-to-pseudo-3D game in which you control a little yellow ball through a complex filled with bad guys. You can only see things that aren’t blocked by other things, so you can’t see past walls. Enemies have fully functioning AI, and they will patrol and guard areas. If they see or hear you, they’ll chase you, and if they touch you, you will die. A compass tells you the general direction to move to. There are 3 ‘areas’ the compass points to, the third being the end. Reach that and you win. You can sprint, but that makes noise and costs energy, so use it to get out in emergencies, and use it wisely. You can also creep to move slower, allowing you to peek around corners more safely. Leaning left or right allows you to peek around corners more easily.

There are 4 difficulty modes. The fourth mode, plague bearer, changes the game a little bit. While you are even weaker than the 3rd difficulty level, you will notice a few subtle changes. Additionally, as a plague bearer, if you touch an enemy that is not aware of you, then he will die. Make it to the end as a plague bearer and you will earn a virtual cookie for being awesome because I haven’t finish it yet that way.

I’ve added custom keybind options. It’s not perfect (it only supports keyboard, not mouse input) and there’s probably a few edge cases not working, but as far as I know it’s good enough for simple rebinds. So yes, I thought of you non-wasd-ers 😀

I had a lot of fun creating this game, even though I know I could’ve done better. But due to some design decisions early on, it ended up like this. It’s not bad, but it could’ve been more. 😀 I’ll write a post-mortem in a few days, showing the few goods, the bunch of bads, and the oh so many uglys.

The first person to win plague bearer mode receives a virtual cookie of awesomeness

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3501

I’m really quite pleased with how this turned out. Timelapse and post-mortem coming soon, but now sleep. Lots of it.

A fun exciting game where the player is a square in a land of circles escape as fast as u can for the highest score. This was A blast to make even with limited time. Includes 3 levels and multi player, with a randomly generated map. Experience the pull of the bubbles at https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/eskapae%20from%20buble%20land.exe?w=64a0abbc

Have fun playing and thankyou ludumdare

~Gibby~

So I finally managed to get the game submitted.  I had a lot of fun doing this, and learned a lot.  Next time I’ll be sure to fully complete my game and have more than one level 😀  My game can be played here!

This has been an odd experience. The main reason I love Game Jams like Ludum Dare is the sense of community I get while reading the blog posts. With the Website errors this Ludum Dare felt really lonely.

I will post a write up later. For now I am just glad to be done.

Unity Web version here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld21/

After about six hours here and there I have finished a tiny irritating platformer, called Press Space, because that’s all you do…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5183

So I finally did it!

After a slow start coming up with an idea for the theme, i finally found my groove and worked towards finishing my game.

There are a million things I wish I had done differently, things that I needed cut to make the experience feel more cohesive, things that i intended to polish up but didn’t have time, and things that i probably should have taken out.  Audio also took a back seat this time, and i know that’s going to dent the overall experience, but i really was close to the wire as it was. Maybe i’ll have time to put it in a Jam version.

My take on the theme is as follows;

“You play the role of a magical seed that is buried inside the giant mountain. Your task is to escape from the mountain’s belly and into the sky, before it closes its mouth again”

I deliberately limited my palette and stuck to simpler forms as this lends itself better to the rapid design approach and is fairly easy to maintain. Going with a surreal fantasy theme also let me be more bold with art style (strong contrasts, mostly white ) which I hope makes it more visually distinctive and feel less prototypey ( is that a word? ). There are so many improvements I would want to make to this mainly to the character forms, and linework, but i’m still learning, so it’s the best i could do for now

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my second Ludum Dare ( I’m shattered though!). Interestingly, and more so than “Drum Hammer Dig”, I really feel like this game can be expanded on into a much larger experience, so i intend to come back to this game in the future.

In the meantime enjoy;

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4202

Tah-dah.

The game took me quite some time to do, but ended up very short. That’s what happens when you create levels by hand using code. The beginning and ending were a bit last-minute (almost literally), but I worked on little parts of the level throughout today.

I also ran short of time when I was programming the traps, so I had less time to make the levels. Towards the end of it, I realized a way to make it actually somewhat “fun.” Hopefully I’ll do better next time.

But that’s enough of me making excuses, please check it out!

It’s not quite as finished as I would have hoped, but it’s playable and interesting. I just didn’t have enough to make “cool” graphics.

I was so budgeted for time I finished it with 16 minutes to spare. 😀

To play you have to type commands and then Esca (The purple rectangle) will execute them. The goal is to escape from illiteracy.

Perhaps I’ll make a post compo version later.

Phew. That was stressful. Having worked to fix a stupid bug for most of the evening there was not much time for balancing the game. I hope it’s not too easy. I’ll write more later, for now here are screenshots and a link to the game: http://danikgames.com/stuff/LD21/index.html. Now I need to sleep.

That was a blast! I had no idea that I was even capable of completing a game so quickly. It almost makes me think that I shouldn’t spend as much time as I normally do keeping my code readable.

I wasn’t quite able to finish my game – no win/lose/ending; but I was still able to make something playable, and write some pretty advanced code (an efficient path-finding algorithm from scratch). Even though my game’s pretty boring, I am glad I participated in the competition. I believe it has made me a more efficient and more confident coder, and to an extent, artist. I will most definitely be doing this the next time around too. But for now, I’m going to take a break from coding. I’d say those 2300 lines should be worth at least a week off.