After a month of coding straight for work related projects, I should have known that I would have spurted and died when trying to do something in such a tight deadline. At about 11 o’clock last night, I dedcided against continuing my escape game and just wrapping up the few things I was working on. Normally, I would be sad of this, since I didn’t complete my established goal, but I think I got a lot done that I was proud of myself for doing and something that I can definitely take with me to another idea.

What went wrong:

• I went too big. The idea I had was an espionage, metal gear-esque game called “Sidekick Escape!” which would have featured you smuggling a sidekick that had its own mood meter. Not hard on its own, but the sidekick (A fairy, ala Navi. Some of you may see where this is going.) If it’s in the green, it would be complacent. If it was in the red, you are in danger of being detected by “Hey! Listens!” or potentially use her to make some sort of temper tantrum explosion of some sort. Items like Candy could make her mood meter go into the positive, with duct tape making her shut up but seriously decreasing her mood once it wears off. The levels would be single screen and would require some AI work that I hadn’t done in a long while (And I’m lazy when it comes to making enemy AI. :P) and I didn’t realize how large of a scope I was making this on myself until I was knee deep into it. If I remember anything for the next LD, it’s that thinking simpler is okay.
• I slept too much, due to said exhaustion: Like I said, I’ve been working quite a bit in the last month and this was the first real weekend that I could call “free time”. I was already running ragged and I let the alarm clock go far too many times, losing valuable time in it. I’m terrible about doing this on a day to day basis anyway, so maybe I’ll have my sleep schedule in check for the next one.
• I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I let this get the better of me. When I saw how much further I had to go to get to my intended goal, I started slacking off more and more. It’s behavior I am working to improve myself on in the future. Not everything has to be perfect, especially for a game being made in a 48 hour time period, no matter how much I wish it to be.

What went right:

• Despite the theme being something I did not expect (I was really hoping on “Dreams” or “Self-Replication”, I think. I had good ideas for those!) I think the creative waterfall was let loose for me as I thought of random fun things for the game and the initial concept.  It was something that I missed and I’m glad to get the flow going again.
• I had fun working on it. I did! I had all these stupid details planned out for the game (I was going to name the main character “Sid” and the fairy sidekick “Ekic”, to go along with all the other bad puns.) that I can carry around to make this a full fledged game at some other time.
• I know have several classes set up for switches and bullets in AS3 that I did not have previously. And they best part is, they’re easily portable to whatever project I decide to work on next. Rockin’!
• The funny part is, choosing to relax than to stress out on the rest of the project was something that I think did indeed go right for me. It’s no good for me to try to push it when I’m already stressed out from work things. Let the mind rest. I played some Red Dead Redemption and tinkered with a bit more, but that was it. All in all, it still made for a good weekend and not a disappointing one. I do know this, however:  When the next one comes, I will be better prepared. And it will make the best thing ever. I promise!

Anyway, if you want to see it (I’m not going to officially submit it. While technically you do escape, it’s not much else.) you can go to http://crowbar.ripsystem.com/projects/ld21/ and play it.

Arrows control movement and A shoots bullets. Bullets will turn on wall switches and both enemies and players can affect hitting the switch to open the stairs to the next level (Something that would have been a key puzzle detail in the future.) All in all, I probably spent six hours on it, including sprites and stuff that did not quite make it because I was being lazy.

There you have it. Congrats to everyone who completed their game. If you’re like me and didn’t get that far, don’t be discouraged! Hopefully you learned more than a few things about the game making process that’ll make it easier for you the next time, just like me. See you next Dare!

So I uploaded my submission, unaware that the deadline was moved. Rats! I’ll fix it up, maybe add something here and there, but what I uploaded is probably the final version unless I find some major bugs that need to be fixed. To be honest, I’m burned out from this weekend. I’m very glad with my submission though.

For anyone that wants to play it, the download link is below. Some tips: buy the torch! Also, to escape, consider going back to your roots.

Download!

And what a fun LD! Although Saturday night, my laptop died on me completely…Xcode wouldn’t reopen, ScreenNinja crashed and burned (and lost that day of timelapse). So no timelapse this time However, at the last minute I pulled a mechanic together. My game, Lost Psyche, never ends, but I succeeded in making a very cool music generator. It sounds a bit repetitive structure wise due to the same percussion over and over, but I’m very pleased with how my progression and rhythm seeds work to produce the right notes. This is a project I think I will expand upon in future, possibly as an AU/VST plugin to automatically write musical phrases. Certainly beats writing myself myself 😉

Calm before the storm...

 

Anyhow, it’s been 26 hours since I woke up. I’ve decided not to sleep until at least 6p so I don’t wake up at a stupid o’clock! My current look I’m rocking for lack of sleep and hyper-caffeination:

I should have taken a before photo for comparison.

And a workstation aftermath photo. Not too bad, just 15 empty cans of Mother, and some bottles of well deserved Golden Ale, only 3 more in the fridge though

Rather tidy still...

Woohoo! Got it done and submitted on time! See my entry HERE!

This is my 2nd LD, and the first one that was really complete, so I’m quite proud of myself! I was going to do a full write-up, but I’m just too exhausted. Maybe tomorrow?

A few comments though:

The AI needs refinement. There’s only so much you can do under the time limit… and even less when you don’t actually know the game well enough to have a good strategy even for yourself, no less for a machine.

That said, the AI is pretty competent at Defending, despite sucking at Attacking.

I forgot all about running the whole screencap video thing this time! Eek!

Most of the sounds are me screaming or bashing things into my desk.

I am going to look into what it would take to refine this for an android/apple app!

Aaand… yeah! Good job everyone! I look forward to actually being able to participate in the judging this time; something I completely missed out on last time. Hundreds and hundreds of games to review! Eek! Too much fun!

Tags: awesome, complete, game, pygame, python, tablut, tallbutt, viking

So .. you’re a bit of a pickle and need to use your lady-brains to get you out of it … 

Play: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1087

Click to play

LD Page

Tags: as3, flashpunk, ninja, princess

So, I finished at about midnight, which was pretty good time. No sound, but that would have been an afterthought anyway.

The bar.

Unrest is a game where you have the goal of escaping hopelessness. You are set upon by all the issues that plauge your life, and must fix them without creating too many issues, or making any one issue too big.

You can grab a copy of the source code, but unfortunately no compiled versions yet. I was planning on waiting, but after hours of setting up the environment under Windows (real pain compared to Linux) it turns out the latest version of the bindings has a bug.

If you use linux and happen to have the older versions of the PySFML2 bindings, please give it a go, if you don’t, you can give it a try and see if your distribution has the right versions (if at all).

My mistake, just turns out the bindings have changed. I’ve updated the source code to reflect that, and it should now work with the newest version of the bindings. Windows build coming soon. Windows build now up.

I havn’t got easy access to a Mac to make a build – but the source code version should work if you can get all the dependancies (SFML2, PySFML2, Python).

This is the primary release. Escape – Forest 2012 – Version 1.123 – 48 hour game entry

Requires

Java  –  http://www.java.com/en/download/
JMF  (for music) – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/download-142937.html

It does have spelling errors and was uploaded over an hour and a half ago

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/38895459/ludum_d21/ludum_d21.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/38895459/ludum_d21/run_game.bat

Just unzip the zip file and copy the run_game.bat file into the install directory (forgot to put it in the zip /facepalm).

Just click the run_game.bat file once you’ve copied it into the install directory

Its a quirky text adventure with some scanned pencil drawings with graphics touch ups in Paint Shop Pro,  lots grammatical and spelling mistakes (had to find them after uploading eh? that’s lysdexia for ya! 😉 and over 30 minutes of music.

Runs on the Macintosh (Should be ok with Linux) from the command line
java ludum.Escape

If  I have time and energy I might do a secondary release to fix some spelling mistakes and slight glitches.

Regards

Cameron Mckechnie

Ludum Dare #21 Entry Page

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=5609

Tiny URL for this page   http://tinyurl.com/4yq6yh6

For the last 24 hours I’ve been creating a game for the LD48,  the theme was announced on Saturday morning (3 am here!) as “Escape”.

With the theme Escape the first thing that came to mind was a platformer consisting of various levels with enemies to get past / kill, however when I started on developing it I quickly became bored with the idea and after looking at a couple of other projects people had announced I realised that it was being done by several people.

Instead of continuing with the platformer idea I opted to create something different, I enjoy making procedural enviroment’s so I created a city algorithm that effectively created a maze which the engine then drew city buildings / decals and objects onto. On top of this it added guards and snipers to give the player something to fear while trying to find the exit (Which is randomly placed too!)

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Anyway, makes more sense to actually see the game in action!

Links to Game and Source code:

Ludum Dare Source-code for CityRun

CityRun

Let me know what you think!

Tags: ld48, screenshot

A game about having nowhere to run but faster.

I took a good deal of inspiration from Canabalt, shifting the perspective to first person, and the player’s control to fending off a never ending tide of pursuers. Have fun, I had a lot making the thing.

 

Grab my Source | Play the Game

 

 

My game ‘Vault’ went into the submission morass about 45 minutes ago. CLICK HERE!

This is a game about a security system, a series of barriers you gotta hack your way through in grayscale rectangle land.

As is my wont, I spent more time doodling around with superficials (and lazing about) than working on the game proper, so the experience is rough and feels sort of cloudy. It’s consists of an odd game mechanic where optimization is the most interesting thing, yet the only push to optimization that I put in was points and leaderboards for finishing in X moves. Maybe ought to have added a fuel gauge limiting how many moves you can take. The game could use a lot more experimentation, level design and otherwise.

With leaderboards and that unique hamburger something or other, I hope this Flash game will mean something to someone.

Tags: final, flash, Flixel, postmortem, vault

Well, I submitted my game. I have to remember how to package my submission for next time though, since it took well over an hour for me to go from “Done” to “Done and shared”. So, tips to myself and others using SFML & Mac OSX:
1) sndfile.framework needs to be included.
2) Remember to add frameworks to the “Copy Frameworks” step.

Other than that, I’m very pleased with my game. At the start of this competition, I really did not have any good ideas – or at least, I didn’t really have any ideas that I really wanted to work on until about 40% of the way into the contest (although, I hadn’t had much time to work on it prior to that, so I only lost an hour or two of work time). I actually was planning to leave the competition entirely because my ideas were all basically remakes of some other game – that is, the theme was only present in the assets that I created, not in the game mechanic itself. Also, I got the game finished faster than I thought, since I only *meant* to do the Jam.

I’ll probably get a bit more into the process later, but for now, I’m quite tired.

I just finished my first ludum dare game! I’m so excited. Go play it!

 

 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5421

 

The first actual game, in an actual kind-of-finished state. I must say i am kind of proud of it.
I like the game idea and art direction quite a bit, so i might continue working on it, depending on the feedback

Sorry, however, for the lack of updates, but most work went into the map editor, and screenshots would have all looked all the same.

I hope you enjoy this little game, because i sure enjoyed developing it.

Thanks for hosting Ludum Dare

(and thanks to notch at mentioning #LD in his twitter, i would have missed it otherwise

 

Good night \o

This was my first time doing anything like this, and I’m actually pretty happy with the output.

There are a few minor bugs, but nothing killer (I think/hope)

I decided to go for a more story-based game than I have before. The gameplay could be better, but I will continue to work on it after Ludum Dare.

I also eventually try to port it to other platforms, namely Linux.

Check it out: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5267

Red buttons and red doors

Tags: finished, LD21

It still amazes me what someone can accomplish in 48 hours, especially when it comes to making video games. There is so much that goes into make a game – artwork, sounds, game design, programming, etc – that I am surprised what comes out of Ludum Dare is even playable. Nonetheless, most of the games I’ve looked at so far are awesome! I’m going to try and not touch any more though until the ratings open up. Anyway, this is supposed to be a post mortem.

When I was first presented with the theme, I immediately thought of rouge-likes. Mostly because in such games, you are always put in situations where your two options are fight or flee (escape). Not to mention, once you get to the bottom you have to escape all the way back to the surface with your prize. This how the ascending from the depths mechanic came about.

Of course Minecraft and Terarria had some influence here, but just because I wanted some sort of destructible terrain. There really isn’t any sandbox elements present unless you like channeling water and lava away from you. Either way, going in this direction allowed me to explore tile maps in Flashpunk/AS3. I have used them before in a couple of my past games, but not to this extent. Prior to Caved In, I only used tile maps for platformers or any games with some sort of pre-defined level. In this case, I am procedurally generating entire levels that the player can interact with – every single block is manipulable.

In my first LD game, Voyage of Discovery, every tile was an individual entity which caused some pretty bad frame rate issues but since it was turn-based, it wasn’t too much of a problem. Obviously the same technique wouldn’t have done too well in Caved In as there are 875 blocks per level, but the tile map technique does wonders! Yet, as expected, the code is VERY messy since I was sprinting through the whole thing. I always want to add more than what I can comfortably do in 48 hours.

The rest of the game was the usual, nothing new. I will be revisiting  this someday as I want to make a graphical, simplistic, and user friendly game similar to dwarf fortress. Until then…

PLAY CAVED IN

Tags: cave in, flashpunk, post-mortem, tile maps

Wow, finished my game and am just exhausted.

This is an arcade game that I tried to model after classic arcade games like Mario Bros. The objective is to escape from the room (alive).

I should point out this is as much a puzzle game as it is an arcade game. It is pretty tricky but it is solvable. You will definitely have to use your brain to escape the room.

Well, please check it out. It is in flash and I posted it on Kongregate. Let me know if you like it. Hopefully I can do more levels now as that should be super easy.

Warning, this thing is probably buggy as hell. I got what I could, but there have to tons of issues left.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=258

My goal from the start of the competition was to finish my entry and I reached it!

Concept: Qua-tzar is a simultaneous turn based local multiplayer game. The object of the game is to get your BITs to your spaceship on the other side of the game board without being captured.

Inspiration: The initial idea came from a gym class game I played in elementary school called Octopus. In Octopus everyone would line up on one side of the gym and try to get to the other without being tagged by people in the middle. I took part of this idea and turned it into a symmetric two player game where each side has pieces that move across the board to score and also pieces that can capture or prevent your opponent from doing so. Then I thought of simultaneous turn based movement and started to prototype the game with my Chess set.

Since it’s a local multiplayer game I realize it’s going to be difficult for a lot of people to play. I hope you check it out and let me know what you think!

Entry Page 

Play Game (Web – Unity)

Tags: unity

I am really happy with how Escape the Wolf: OHR turned out.

I used the OHRRPGCE game engine. I took advantage of the layered tilemap engine, the built-in sprite editor, and the slice collection editor (screen layout editor). Pretty much everything else I scripted. The OHRRPGCE only has one real datatype, the integer. strings are accessed via an integer handle, and there is no array type, although there are a few ways to “fake” arrays. needless to say, scripting anything complex in the OHRRPGCE is an adventure. Take a look at escapewolf.hss if you please. It is a peculiar language.

For music I mumbled and warbled into my laptop microphone, and applied the noise removal filter in Audacity.

For the full-screen graphics that I couldn’t do inside the OHRRPGCE, I used MyPaint to draw and color, and the Gimp to get things cropped and sized and ready to import.

And I can’t think of anything else to say. Sleep time!

“Once upon a time, there was a sheep called “sheep”, The sheep “sheep” managed to escape on the great day of the sacrifice festival (Eid Al-Adha/Kurban Bayrami)”…..  yup.

It’s a collab with my Turkish friend Mustafa Colpan, for the jam. we will continue working on it after the compo (probably releasing for the iPhone and Android as well, since that would be a good excuse for making a shitty game).

Anyway, This is a crappy prototype, done in less than 12 hours with a complete disconnection from the outside world which nullified my chance of learning anything new. thank you, my main town’s central, thank you.

The game’s current state is complete shit, so play it at your own risk.hmpf, I know I I still have a whole day ahead of me to finish the game, but  I don’t think I need that extra stress thank you, -my lack of internetZ is breaking my brainS-, maybe another time when I have a proper internet connection

here’s the web version:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9047337/SheepNRun/WebVersion/WebVersion.html

Tags: meh, progress, screenshot, unity, Windows