I completed Rooms, a Java Swing game. You can download the jar and view more screen shots at this link.

Well, that was exciting,

Since this was my first try, you might think I wouldn’t be able to get much done in 48 hours. You would be be correct. I had (I thought) modest plans at hour zero, but same plans looked preposterously grand at hour 36. Nevertheless, I feel like I had a great chance to try a few techniques I’d been pondering for a while and actually “finish” a project and, for the low price of a weekend’s worth of sleep, I ended up with a nice little point-and-click adventurer (with a brilliantly original name to boot).

Castle Escape

I got a fun chase animation for our boss going, which was an interesting bit of practice/experimentation for watercolor-style animation.  I’ve been trying to fill in art assets where I can and we’re all buckling down and trying to finish those last bits that really make the thing playable.  Enemies drop weapons and health now, things can die, and there’s a high score screen.  Go team!  I’ve proven less useful in this code than I’d hoped since I sent myself to art-land, but I still poked around in there a bit to make the game end properly when the boss dies.  I’ve written up the todo list of things left before submitting.  It’s bigger than I’d like, but pretty doable.

Good luck everyone!

Managed to get a simple cutscene text intro in before work started, but for now onto the day job. Will try and get a puzzle in after work and submit the smallest game EVAR! for the jam.

Pic of Dollface giving you some bad news!

For those who care, here’s my LD #21 timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNmF2BMoW28

Also, for comparison, here’s the code I started messing with: http://pessoa.fct.unl.pt/d.serrano/amaze

And the game that it ended up being: http://david.substanciadigital.com/ld21

Hope you enjoyed this LD as much as I did =)
See you next time!

I got my entry submitted at about 2am BST, which makes a change from the 2-minutes-before that I usually end up doing. So here’s my entry, VOLCANOWNED!:

DOWNLOAD

I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a very simple game but I think I did a decent job with the graphics. Next time I’ll leave that little bit extra time to record some proper sounds and music.

I’m going to put my timelapse together later and write a full post-mortem soon. And oh man I can’t wait to start playing all the other entries – I swear they just get better and better every time!

Tags: download, final, finished, happy, screenshot

OK, for anyone interested, I developed on Linux and the tools I used during LD21 were:

MyPaint

GIMP

Geany IDE

Google Chrome

Mappy

Bxfr

So here’s my game!

You must escape from Ludum Dare by completing microgames, each based on a Ludum Dare’s historical theme! Play Escape from Ludum Dare here!

Tags: final

I released my game, entitled Facilitated Escape, earlier today. It revolves around escaping a collapsing facility of some kind in your rocket, the challenge coming from dodging oncoming “blocks”. See its entry page and its page on my website. I’ve also put together a gameplay video, and a time-lapse should be coming soon.

What a fantastic weekend! I’m beginning to realize why people always stress the importance of forcing yourself to take breaks. This is an incredibly self-involving craft, and I got so caught up I probably only took about 6 hours worth of breaks throughout (excluding sleep, of course). So, I’m broken but incredibly satisfied, and I had a great time.

View my entry, “Cells”, here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3643

Post-mortem time:

My biggest gripe – adding sound and music has eluded me AGAIN! I also let it slip last time. I’m fairly new to a couple of Actionscript 3 concepts and embedding and playing sounds seems to be pretty simple, but I must be missing something very obvious because I always have problems. I did manage to get sound working in a previous project I worked on, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it going this time. So, I opted to carry on with what I knew rather than spending hours messing around with sound.

The other problem is that I have more experience with 3D and digital art than programming, so even if when I don’t have trouble coming up with a gameplay idea I still tend to focus largely on graphics. I loved the theme this time, but had a hard time coming up with an idea, which meant by the end of the first day I still didn’t have an iota of gameplay/interaction code. The player could run and jump and all the technical aspects were in, but no game. I only came up with the hacking idea on day 2, so I didn’t leave myself enough time to create more challenging puzzles.

That being said, I was very happy with the hacking concept and I think the final game could be tons of fun as a puzzler if those puzzles were more taxing. With things like watching for enemy paths, following electrical connections and being able to hack more floors above, the game would be somewhere between an escape the room game and an arcade puzzler.

The graphics was the other aspect I was very happy with. I managed to get an animated character in too and even though his animations were a little rough, I can see that a little animation makes a huge difference. I wanted to do more with lighting – as you got higher the floor you were on would be brighter – but that, and many other tweaks, will come if and when I update the game. I also love the dark and slightly spooky atmostphere and I’d love to tie a creepy or mind-bending story into Cells.

Overall, I’m really happy with my entry. Good luck all!

Finally submitted my entry! Too tired to write anything else, so here’s a copy-paste of the entry desctiption! (And a screenshot!)

Here’s the link to the submission
Wow. I literally just wrote code, 3d-modelled, composed music pretty much non-stop for 48 hours. I had some problems building the Windows version in the end, so posting this a little late (thank god for the extension!).

The game is a little smaller than I originally planned, but I’m pretty proud of it and I hope that you enjoy it!

I used a framework called Polycode (which I am also the developer of and which you can find at polycode.org).

Aside from that I used Blender for 3d modelling and animation, Photoshop for all graphical needs, Reason 4 for music and SFXR for sounds.

The code is a real mess, so don’t take it too seriously. I had to jam a ton of quick fixes in the last few hours, so it’s really really ugly.

HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!

And is done. Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5234

Wish I had more time, but nevertheless, enjoy!

Tags: gamemaker, ld48, Windows

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under LD #21. 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.

Yeah finally done! Kinda… Still a lot I didnt get to add, like gruesome decore, music, harder puzzles… Maybe I’ll add to it someday but I’m sick of it at the moment

It’s submitted under the jam since I went over the Compo time limit. Here

Bed time!

Last night I submitted my first ever entry into LD. Loved every minute of the experience. At times I definitely felt like quitting. Glad I got my act together and submitted!

The game itself is a small adventure with a mini game on each screen. Just keep looking around for visual and audio clues and you’ll figure out how to get to the next stage.

Screenshot from the game:

My main focus was to create an interesting atmosphere to suck the player into the weird world. I think I succeeded fairly well in that aspect. The music & graphics work very well together in my opinion. Overall there’s a very distinctive vibe to the game.

I wish I’d had more time to create a few more puzzles and add some more clues into the game on how to resolve the puzzles. But I just ran out of time and probably made some bad design decisions along the way that prohibited me from created more puzzles.

This game was written from scratch in Java using the amazing libgdx framework. Pretty amazing cross-platform framework. Check it out here: http://libgdx.googlecode.com

I’ll definitely be taking this project beyond LD and make a nice little game out of it. It’ll also give me time to further tweak the assets & music and give it some good old polish.

Check the game out here: Still Dreaming

Congrats to the other 500 people that submitted an entry so far (wow!). Looking forward to the next couple weeks of playing everyone’s games!

Cheers,
Bach

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4369

Phew, finally got it all uploaded and done! I’ll do a post-mortem later, right now I just want to sleep. Thanks LD!

PLAY NOW! (Unity3D web)

WASD to move, SPACEBAR to jump.
MOUSE to look, LEFT-CLICK to do stuff.

>>> You’re the type of guy who starts fires, just so you can save people from them and be a hero. First you’ll set your Fire Bomb, then you’ll rescue your Victims. Maybe your plan will go awry (it probably will) and you’ll just have to ESCAPE by yourself, leaving the rest behind in their screaming agony?

– 8 different endings
– dynamic fire propagating system
– dynamic level destruction! wow!
– totally unrealistic model of firefighting
– … and more!

Made with Unity3D, some super simple models in Maya, some sounds recorded on a Singstar USB mic + Audacity, and some simple textures in Photoshop.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4369

Tags: FPS, unity, unity3d, web game

Now the progress I made yesterday.

• Difficulty settings
• Statistics screen
• Extended level
• More spike directions

Aaaand demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18105137/scrash.exe

I have submitted my entry already, let’s see if I can make the game better in time. 😀

Once there was a weekend I made a game in …
… and that was yesterday.

Thank you, McFunkypants to remind me of “write the code, only then you’re ready for making graphics’n’stuff”

Yeah, that worked better, last time I worked on the code, panicked, worked on the graphics, came down and worked on the code again, only to have forgotten a few things.

So, I made a game about escaping ..an interstellar encounter with pirates, flowery aliens, asteroids and a f-ing sun

Goto Entry

You’re the 80’s style super cool, super human rough’n’though chief engineer (something I think about Philhassey and PoV right now :-P) who’s on board a freighter with some nearly out of the flightschool noobs, who don’t know anything and try to steer you right through the sun. You’ve got to keep the ship together, until your ship reaches the jump gate. You’ve got a crew of 8 nameless – but I’m sure nonetheless cool – mechanics that you can have working on various systems to keep your ship flying.

The idea was that you have these “lets hide in that asteroid field, that would hurt us, but the pirates will surely die sooner” – moments. And “oh god, we’ll never reach that gate, unless we explode our warpcore right behind us, but wouldn’t that hurt the hull to much?”

First of all, I’ve only got one level. Ok, the positions of the enemies and the asteroids change, but their numbers and the positions of you, your target and the sun stay the same. But I had that mentioned moments a few times, so I hope that works.

Second, there are bugs. I couldn’t test it on Windows 7 which seemes to be a problem, since a few friends (but not all of them) with hardcore gaming machines said it would lag und firefox 6. I on the other hand had no problems with my 5 year old core2duo under windows xp. don’t know.

Third, there are bugs. Yeah, again, I’m not sure but I don’t think the shields do that they’re supposed to do. But with the right configuration you’re able to survive the sun. And sometimes the systems bleed health without beeing attacked, don’t know why.

Ah, and something about the weekend: Since I’m in germany I staid up laaate (4 a.m. saturday morning) to get the theme and watch the madness on irc. I got to bed around 4:30, already having the idea in mind, but I didn’t want to miss the morning shower under which I have the best ideas, strangely, before starting something. Around 8 o’clock a child started screeming for hours in the flat right next to mine. I guess my neighbors have guests, since they don’t have child. Argh. Saturday was nearly over after that, I had a headache the whole  day, live streaming didn’t work and my moods were down. I sleeped over the afternoon and then drove to friends to play uno, that was relaxing a bit. I came home Sunday morning around 1 o’clock, and started working. And didn’t much stop until Monday morning 3 o’clock.

And that’s how Make a run for it got made

Thanks to PoV and Philhassey for fixing the server, after we made it crash – and in fact for this whole event!

(hopefully I didn’t miss another person who worked on the LD-Site? If so, please hit me hard and tell me his or her name)

Just submitted an entry to LD for the first time, and well, it’s not the most serious game ever made. Problem was that this Saturday we had decided to play some board games with friends (initially Diplomacy but we ended up with Android) and Sunday we were going to a family dinner. Soo, not much time left to code. Last minute I scrapped my plans of writing an awesome platform game in Scala and threw this ape game together in Java using Slick2D.

Tags: apes

After 10 hours, 53 minutes and 20 seconds of frantic coding due to a very late start, the Sky Fell.

Download the 1.8Mb zip file for Windows.

The servers also fell, and while I got my entry  in successfully last night, I left this final post for today. My entry this time around is the most playable and complete game I’ve developed for LudumDare. I’m very pleased with how it turned out – especially seeing I started very late and didn’t put much time into it. The game looks lovely in motion, and unfortunately the grey screenshots don’t do it justice. Saying that, here’s a grey screenshot :

I’m not entirely satisfied with the game. I had to manually program all of the particle effects, something that my previous games never needed because I had tool-set already developed for that. The graphics turned out OK due to an amazing fluke. I bought a new camera, and played with it all the way to work and back on Saturday. When I started my LudumDare entry, I had a huge stash of photos taken during the competition period – just sitting waiting to be used. With a bit of colour correction they turned out ok, but trying to modify anything made me miss my old Wacom Tablet. Hopefully next LD I’ll be back up and running as an artist.

The game takes some practice, but it is possible to win!  Good luck in your Escape  …

Tags: final

Well that was fun.

After spending a day and a half working on my original idea – a sidescrolling platformer where you play as a spaceship captain who must escape onto the last escape pod before the core overloads – I realised two things:

1. I suck at making platformers that aren’t buggy piles of rubbish
2. I had just enough time left to start over

So I did. I had 15 hours or so, and apart from a couple of hours here and there I spent them all working on what ended up being called “Escape the Space Nazis!”

The name came from a last-minute thought: “Hey, wouldn’t it look cool if the game was in the style of a WWII propaganda poster?”
Well I’m sure it would, but the stuff I ended up with wasn’t too bad either. Throw in some stuff about ‘Space Nazis’, and BAM – that’s the story done in about five minutes.

There are a few bugs that I had to work around, it’s not the most pleasant thing to look at (or listen to) and there’s only one level – but I hope you enjoy it!
(And in my defense – it was made in 15 hours at the very most!)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1886