So, Escape, huh? Hmm…

Now to go ponder that over breakfast and coffee – and remember:

So, I gave up on my first idea in the middle of the coding.

But I’m so lazy, but so lazy, that I decided to incorporate the beggining of the first game into the second, thus an Inception throphy is awaited.

Also, I decided to give up on the drawings, they were sucking too much.

So, when I had the problem of having no art whatsoever, a friend of mine gave me the idea of how my house was scary.

Now, my art is based on photography.

I’ll slip a pic used in my game, so everyone can take a hint on what it will look like.

He just wants a hug!

soooo… finished the codebase at last

now on for some serious gameprogramming.

i wondered why everybody starts with the titlescreen.. so for reasons of peer-group-pressure

awesome…………..not

Tags: progress update

Well I seem to have missed the first few but that’s cool. Also wasn’t expecting ‘Escape’, which I think it a pretty good theme.

See if I can come up with ideas whilst I sort out my hours and then go crazy making a game of awesome.

It’s the first time I try to post something during the 48 h

I’m currently working on some sort of puzzling where you must escape a rainbow prison by destroying the right tiles.

You have to reach the border without waking up the guardians ( red balls )

Play it here !

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2011 at 5:52 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.

So, I don’t know if I’m even gonna finish, but heres to trying!

So after talking to a friend for a bit, playing some games, and just goofing off, I finally have my idea set! I decided to go with a puzzle time game (gasp, so common), and its a platformer (o no … you say!), but if I can do this right, I think it could be a cool little game. The idea behind it that got the ball rolling was the question “Whats something thats nearly, or is, impossible to escape?”. First thing that came to mind for me, Reality. So I set off on ideas on how to bend the rules of reality in just a slight enough way to make it interesting. I’ve had an idea in my head for a while about doing some type of puzzle game with colors being the main way of solving things, so its time I finally use it!

No screen shots yet, and I don’t know how much detail I’m supposed to be able to go into but I doubt I’ll get copied …

The premise is that your trapped in a scientists lab, in a room with a flask with some brightly blue colored liquid. You’ve been there for days and can find no way out and you start hearing voices to make you drink it, so you do. After you do, the world around you starts shifting and changing colors to the same as the liquid! You notice a hole that didn’t used to be there before in the wall, and then you realize, that hole the hole in the wall is where a giant red brick was, no blue in it at all. You get the feeling you can shift between the two states at will and are able to pass through certain colored objects!

I’m not a writer, so the story is about as much as its gonna get (and may not even make it in!)

I’ll probably start coding tomorrow morning or maybe even a little tonight. I’m planning on using C# with XNA, and maybe Farseer physics if I need it.

Well, that’s my ‘good night’s sleep’ *yaaawwwn*

Time to ponder over breakfast; Escape, huh?

I’ll post up some pictures in a few hours, where hopefully I’ll have something. Good luck to everyone just starting, and well done to all those posting up some pretty cool stuff already!

Thats what I’ve done so far:

• Brainstorming for an idea.
• Fleshed out the idea, all an some pages of paper
• Made 2 little proof of concepts for the core mechanics (network stuff)
• Made a milestone plan with 16 Milestones and a time schedule of 25 hours (need time to sleep and a time-buffer)

Beginning to work on the game now. Production-Phase 😉

Ok, I’m in. I gotta finish painting my apartment this weekend, and the malmö festival is going on, Little more than a week of free live music, and food from all around the world(I tend to stick to mini-donuts). Yesterday I enjoyed CocoRosie and Iron & wine, and today it’s even more. This all adds up to that I might not make a great game, but a 3-hour game-maker game with really basic programmer art (boxes, circles and simple colors) and probably somewhat sucky gameplay and less than perfect theme accordance.

About an hour in I got a basic gameplay and mousebased onebutton control, that probably will be okayish when I go fullscreen.

Tags: music, progress

Ok, I have some kind of a concept. Not super happy about it, but it’s something so I’ll just go with it.

Anyway, first pixels up on screen! Here we go!

I have had an idea for a sokoban (it’s not sokoban) style game for a while, the player needs to get from one side of the room to the other by shifting groups of blocks up or down.  I have lacked the motivation to put it in to code but now I am good to go.

Don’t know about plot yet, but I’m making some progress on the backbone of the game: you have to escape a dynamically propagating fire in the building. You start in a high-rise and have to make your way down, all while rescuing as many people as possible. Also tinkering with the idea that you’re the same person who actually starts the fire. The fire also burns down entire walls / floors — so sometimes you’ll want to use the fire to make a shortcut, and sometimes it’ll just plain kill ya.

I have the skeleton of the fire propagation in-place. Now to just build a test level and start tweaking timing / balance variables. Then spend Sunday on visuals / level scripting. Goodnight LDers!

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity

About to head to bed.

Just been working on basic controls and physics stuff. Here’s the glamorous screenshot, WOW! We’ll see if this goes anywhere

I actually managed to wake up 4am to read the chosen theme. Escape…I’m actually glad it got chosen because it’s leaves a lot of freedom, at least in my head.

So I spent about 4 hours brainstorming and thinking of possible escape games. A lot of them unfeasible to implement in this short time frame and others just plain boring. I’m quite happy with what I’ve come up with, I’ll explain it in a later post, though I’m still struggling to make it actually feel like a game and to make it feel like you are escaping from something.

Anyways here is one of my doodles and two screenshots of some cubes and balls. I decided to go for LWJGL despite my previous “EVERYTHING FROM SCRATCH” attitude and I’ve been copying a few basic snippets here and there. Feels good to have something on the screen.

Well, I’m a bit late to start, but Currently I’m working on a random maze generator that you need to escape from.. before something bad happens to you 😉

Set in first person perspective, with very dark lighting right now, I kind of like the feel of it.

Not much to show yet, just my groundwork scripts that lay out 10 floors for you to walk / fall off of since there are no walls yet.

Will be spending awhile making a bit of a maze generator before I will have anything to show most likely.

Also.. this is my first attempt at Lundum Dare,  so good luck to everyone else =)

A stupid amateur bug delayed me by about an hour.

If i had a project plan or time timetable id’ be behind. Good thing I don’t!

Weird. I’d got the impression Self-Replicating was a sure thing for the theme. Not to worry though, I reckon I’ve got a decent idea to be going on with.

I’m going to attempt a strategy roguelike idea I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It’s going to be called Safari Park Escape, and the idea is that you’re trying to get a group of animals (escaped from a safari park) to evade their keepers for long enough that they eventually give up the search, and your animals can live free and wild in the British countryside. It’s a bit ambitious, but if I keep things simple it should be do-able. It also sets itself up for a sequel: Safari Park Liberation, where the escaped animals come back to liberate all the animals they left behind…

* – Little known fact: ‘Porridge for Victory’ was an actual slogan used in the Second World War in Scotland. Winston Churchill, struggling to cope with the UK’s extremely limited supply of food, instituted a strict ‘Porridge-only’ diet on the entirety of Scotland, uttering the infamous words, “Miserable buggers. They’ll probably be happy they’ve got something else to complain about.” This policy is the real reason behind the continued antipathy between Scotland and England, and is the reason many Scots still cannot look at (or even smell) a bowl of porridge without wanting to throw up.

Tags: foodphoto

It’s the end of the first day, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how development has gone so far, especially considering pygame is something I’ve essentially never touched before.

My game has stuff like

• Decent collision detection
• Maps
• Patrolling enemies
• Dialog
• Super top secret gameplay element (not really, you can go play it on github if you want)
• Open source github repo https://github.com/johnfn/ld21

The graphics are ALL placeholders right now. You’re the anomalous bottom right square inside the rectangle. The grumpyface is the enemy. I wonder what that blue thing is..? And how on earth are you ever going to ESCAPE that rectangle? I dunno…

Collison detection is working now and impoved some graphics on the fool using a perlin noise :).
I also added some music i generated using  Autotracker-C and VLC Player (To convert it)

Next things i need to do, getting warp/portals/en much more stuff to work

Version 0.0.001: http://games.corne.info/LD21/1/
Version 0.0.002: http://games.corne.info/LD21/2/
Version 0.0.003 (Current): http://games.corne.info/LD21/3/
Stream: http://stream.corne.info

It’s been six hours already in the contest, and I’m deciding to hit the hay for a little bit for now. It’s been a pleasant surprise getting the theme above, and I’ve been making sure to put it to use in the project. The game has been going rather well, aside from a few code hiccups here and there which have been resolved, the graphics for the most part are completed as well as the Map for the game. What is required now is placement of Enemies, basic enemy AI, a bit more polish on the code and music. Oh wonderful music.

I’ll sleep on this. Hopefully I can get a screenshot of the project up sometime soonish, but for now, It’s time for me to get some sleep. Before I pass out from exhaustion.

… and tells me what’s the theme for LD21. I even get one idea, so maybe I have to participate this time Hour and half later I have done some kind of proof of concept to prove myself that I might even get through with it.

Hi there.
Just woke up and I really like this theme although I don’t have any ideas yet.
The only thing I did was creating a skeleton project just now which already shows the classical black screen 😀

I’m going to have some breakfast now, good luck to everyone

Tags: waking up

Level 2. Man, didn’t expect those moving platforms to cause me grief. I guess you just can’t plan everything ahead in Ludum Dare. They’re a bit buggy, but close enough to say they’re working!

I’ve got it now: every level is going to have one of the pictured yellow collectibles that take extra effort to get. Killing yourself is enough to move on to the next host body, but you can’t escape the curse (and get the good ending) unless you gather all the collectibles as well.

I started somewhat late tonight and was only able to put a few hours in; most of my time has been spent on getting the basic simulation planned out and the interface layout & cegui bindings

So, after battling for 6 hours (pre and during LD) with bcm4329.ko, my Android tablet is up and running… with Ubuntu. NO OTHER CHOICE ;_;

So, what am I going to use?

CODING:
Text editor – gedit
Compiler – OpenJDK-6

GRAPHICS:
Fingered – PaintJoy/Android (cutscenes)
Pixelart – mtpaint/Linux (I’d happily look for something better)

SOUND:
idk? i never wrote a sound API so my game will be SONUDLSES

OTHER:
IRC the Demotivator – XChat
Browser the lesser Demotivator – Firefox (Chrome doesn’t work on my ARM)

GAME TITLE: Right 31
GAME DESCRIPTION: Escape from the game’s bugs in MULTIPLAYER! You will play on an infinite map, with as many players as you want to!

So, thats it! Whenever I raise my MOTIVATION bar to 99%, I’ll start coding this thing.

Tags: right31 ld21

Morning snack ! Yeah, I love chese.

Yumi !

Tags: foodphoto

Oh God I slept late. Gotta shift it. Very exciting opening up the page to see the theme. Anyway, not sure if I’m supposed to declare these are they’re just plugins for my durr-durr-no-coding monkey program, but I might use Audiere Sound and SpriteFont. Sorry if there’s no need for this and this is just taking up space. Good luck, all, cheers.

Hello errbody! im finished with terrain destruction and all that stuffs. more to come!

Blowing up stuffs!

Progress is really good! All interactions are in and even animations. There are a few bugs present like items sticking in the wall when dropped too close but otherwise it is fairly smooth.

Here’s a shot of the first room.

That is all for now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2011 at 6:26 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.

9:00 AM: Woke up
9:01 AM: Looked up theme
9:30 AM: Got an idea
9:45 AM: finished a sketch

After some bug fixing (remember, when using classes, include classes to your dependencies) the engine fires up some TMX goodness:

Note that the important window is on the left, the black one with the blue grid…

It’s 4:30 here in the States, so here’s something I’m snacking on:

Hell yeah salmon jerky! Moz cheese! honey buns! and coffee!

When 7am rolls around I’ll be eating some real food. 😀

Tags: foodphoto

I’ve been working for the last 8 weeks until yesterday, so I haven’t had a chance to prepare for this LD at all. I will see what I can come up with anyways.

My workspace:

Make shift keyboard action cam:

I will be using

• Flashdevelop
• Flashpunk
• Photoshop
• Cubase
• Sfxr

I was hoping that I’d be inspired to think of an all-new game idea based on the theme, but unfortunately I couldn’t come up with anything interesting.

So, I’m resorting to my usual LD plan, which is to make one of my existing game ideas: a top-down, tile-based, turn-based, Thief-alike with a squad.

Here’s some programmer art! Say hello, Teddy:

ART

In a desperate bid to introduce something that I hadn’t already thought of, I’ve decided to make all the characters teddy bears, differentiated using texture swaps. The above is the result of an afternoon spent bending Blender to my iron will, imported into Unity with a toon shader chucked onto it for the hell of it.

The real teddy is sitting on my desk. Reference, you know.

Now I just have to: write a way of making levels that’s less tedious than piecing together Unity scenes, make some level art, add some turn-based tile movement with multiple player-controlled characters, add a GUI to select characters / end the turn, write some AI guards to detect/hunt/kill the players, make it possible to win, make one fun level, tweak game mechanics to maek gaem betar, make more fun levels, add sound effects and music, and add a title screen and menus.

Three hours have gone and my teeth really hurt. The game idea is set-ish now, wondering whether to do two games in 48hrs “The Cell” has you a prisoner trying to escape each cell. It’s got a sokoban mechanic in that you can push things around on to switches to open the door. The key mechanic however is that you’re a mutant and with your power you can create duplicates of yourself that move as you do round the cell. To duplicate yourself you need power. If you go close to a guard you’ll wake him (and lose), however your ghostly duplicates can walk right next to him without a sound. Seems like enough mechanics to make a game, no?

Enough words… graphics.. here’s the logo at the start:

And a screenshot of the first complete-able level (though it only uses box pushing). Finally got the levels loading from files so that’ll be a help as I add more features.

Decided to change the wall graphics a bit to make it feel more like you were closed in. I’d be interested to know what people think of the idea, the scale, etc – I’m starting to get a bit wobbly on the idea and risk turning round and starting something else (probably death for LD48?)

I didn’t get good sleep last night, so I’m going to go ahead and sleep now.

All I can offer you is a .png of most of the items in the game. Of course, I won’t say what’s what or what the items do, but at least you all can reflect on my superior artsy skills.

Behold my lack of skills in art.

Good night, LD!

Cant figure out how to stick the player in, so here goes:

http://soundcloud.com/tjcasper/sets/ludum-dare-clips/

this is what ive been working on.  feel free to check it out (but don’t take!)

…and also in!

I just woke up and now I’m going to join in on my first Ludum Dare. My plan is to do a game based on HTML5 canvas using ClojureScript, a dialect of the Clojure programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Since I’ve never used Clojure before (or any other Lisp, for that matter) I don’t expect too much from the final game. My main goal is to have a good learning experience.

So, my next steps:

1. Continue waking up until fully awake.
2. Figure out how to set up a ClojureScript development environment.
3. Write a game!

OK, not much visible change since last time, but the whole world feels much more dynamic now. You are able to freely walk around in it and I’m able to make my levels as big as I want.

Time for some walking and fresh air, then back for some coffee and game-logic

With quite a bit to show for it, if I do say so myself! 😀 A checklist, for those of you with that sort of brain:

Brainstorming/Fleshing Idea: Done.
Intro: Done.

Menu: Done.

Credits/About: Done.

Basic Collision Engine: Done.

FX Engine: Done.

Images: 50% Completion.

Movement Engine: 25% Completion.

AI: 0% Completion.

Multiplayer: 0% Completion.

SFX/Music: 0% Completion.

And for those of you who are more art oriented:

Woke up at around 06:00 brainstormed for around one hour and got the game plan written down. Being my first Ludum Dare ever, I decided to go with extremely simple game concept as my only goal is to actually create something playable.

Escape as theme gave kazillions of ideas, but most of them were just simply out of reach in such a short time span. In the end I decided to go with simple puzzler as it seemed like concept I can actually finish and could be enjoyable.

On actual progress I’ve coded some of the basic logic and the “engine” can load maps from external files. In hindsight I probably should’ve slept few hours more as the first hours of coding was just pain and I made more typos than actual code =).

Here’s a screenie what I actually have on the screen so far… nothing much, but the underlying code is flexible enough so adding new kinds of objects is quick and painless:

screenie1

Tags: C++, escape, progress, screenshot

First time doing a Ludum Dare, I will be using:

– XNA & VS2010

– sfxr

– Photoshop

EDIT: And Tiled, probably

Good luck all!

The place-holder graphics are gone, and new features are added, including the traditional Mega Man disappearing blocks!

Now for bosses, a few more enemies, actual levels and then sound effects and music.

Screenshot:

Well the past 2 and a bit hours been nerve racking. I nearly destroyed 4 months worth of work for my final year university programming assignment. Imagine working day in day out for months on end and having it all of a sudden crashing and not working as it should..

It turned out that 1 function in the application was throwing the whole thing off and it took me 2 hours to fix.. Either way, I now have a level editor working so I am now building levels.

I just got the player.io API connecting to a dev server. I have some experience with this from other projects – it’s pretty decent for making a multiplayer or otherwise net-connected Flash game, though I had some issues getting it into haXe initially(my solution was to get rid of the type annotations and use Dynamic on the parts that were breaking).

The game design has developed from “Dungeon Master and Runners” to “Ice Queen vs. Fire Mages.” The title will be “Heartbreaker” – one which I’ve been itching to use for a while. The mages have been spurned by the Ice Queen, and now compete to escape her cold, deadly kingdom, using their fire magic to clear the path. Meanwhile, the Queen toys with them, placing ice-themed traps and obstacles such as spiky icicles, Yetis, and slippery ground.

Some arts(spritesheets not shown – for effort reasons):

#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 */

It’s only been eight hours into the compo (aaaagh) but I finally have my ideas selected and filled reams of paper with the planning I’ll need to carry it out. One of the things I quickly learned in LD20 was the value of planning when I ran out of plan and had to waste precious hours coming up with new plans.

I’d scan in my planning documents to show everyone, but I feel like that’d ruin the surprise, so here’s a vague and cryptic micro-pitch of the game idea. You’re some weird alien thing (a reoccuring theme in my works, I realise) on a space station trying to escape, and the only other thing I’ll mention is that this would have probably worked for the theme of Enemies as Weapons just as well.

Time to start frantically coding!

Tags: alien, cliches everywhere, Flixel, space station

Very early progress

The theme seemed a bit uninspiring. And I wanted to do something that’s not a tile-based platformer this time…  ended up thinking about the motorbike chase in ‘The Great Escape’, and decided to do a physics-based motorbike game, with procedurally generated terrain (rather heavily inspired by Tiny Wings/Extreme Road Trip/Smuggle Truck/Elastomania etc.)

Got a basic sum-of-sine-waves rendering+scrolling, but I’ve got some ideas to make it more varied. But first, time to add Chipmunk for physics, and get the beginnings of a player in…

I’ve been debating whether to join in the Dare action since late last night. Finally decided I’m going to give it a shot. I won’t be able to put in a whole lot of time, but it’s definitely worth a try.

I’m planning to make a Flash game (using FlashDevelop… can’t afford a licence for the real thing!). Still thrashing out some ideas for the basic concept, but I’m on my mark, I’m ready, and I’m raring to go!

Woke up at 8:00, saw theme, thought of vague idea, started work on vague idea…

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

It’s a top down shooter style game, where you play a character that is stuck in a strange complex. And he needs to get out. Eventually, I hope that there will be guards patrolling the area.

Walking animations take too much time!

Still needs work (front leg looks like it’s bouncing back and forth), but dammit, moving on!

So here, almost as promised, is a 6 hour update on progress!

I’m a little behind where I’d ideally want to be, but am pretty happy with where I am. My next 6 hours will be dealing with working out what a level is and making one or two of those.

OK, the breakfast brainstorming session threw up a few ideas, but the one I’m going to go with is a spy escaping an enemy military base.

What finally sold me on this one is when I realised that if I have him rescued by helicopter I can call my game Get to the Choppah!!!

Time to make me some models.

Tags: get to the choppah, unity

If you recognized this image then you probably know what the game will be about.

Nothing to show yet but after waking up and seeing the theme I’ve come up with an idea and started work on it.

I doubt I’ll be able to finish this on time with my skills but I’m going to give it my best. I’ll give my details on what I’m doing when I actually have something to show.

I’m going to create a ‘simple’ evade all enemies and get out of some place game, with stealth and all that. 2D, top-down view, nothing fancy. The first step was to render the world with line of sight. I’ve just finished that, but there are some unforeseen issues with it. Here’s a picture of what it looks like right now:

You control the direction you’re looking at with the mouse, and you can’t see behind you. I added a few blocks in the room, which you can see. Well, you can’t. You only see the shadows cast by it. Because I want the game to be 2D and not 3D, you cannot ‘see’ walls (like in the old GTA games). At first I thought that would be ok, but now I’m having doubts. You see, when moving around, those shadow cast by the geometry look like 3D pillars that go up in the sky. So, accidentally, it looks like the old GTA games but with black buildings instead of textured buildings. Oops.

So I’ll have to figure out a way to make it look like it’s 2D (which it is), while still keeping shadows like that. Any ideas are welcome, but I’m going to try and add an offset to the shadows so you can still see a little bit of wall before it goes black.

Now it’s time for food, and then I’ll try to fix that. If I can’t get it to look decent in a few hours, then I’ll just keep it as it is now and work on the gameplay. When that’s done, I can always revisit it if I want to. Still, I’m very happy with the result.

Tags: progress, screenshot, xna

I found that the collison detection wasnt that well, so chagned it a lot, works much better now. I also have changed the wall graphics and added much more color. And I just finished with warp 😀

Version 0.0.001: http://games.corne.info/LD21/1/
Version 0.0.002: http://games.corne.info/LD21/2/
Version 0.0.003 (Current): http://games.corne.info/LD21/3/
Version 0.0.004 (Current): http://games.corne.info/LD21/4/
Stream: http://stream.corne.info

Tags: flashdevelop, haXe, work-in-progress

Allrighty! I didn’t plan to join LD this time but what the heck – I’m in! Mostly because when I saw the final theme I got an idea almost immediately that shouldn’t take too long to implement. The player is stuck in a building and needs to *drum roll* escape! Very original, I know, but I have a few twists up my sleeve. 😉

So far the first room and the player is up and running as intended. Now to add some interaction with the game objects and then graphics.

I’m using FP, Sos’s framework, Flash Builder, and Pro Motion.

Good luck to all!

Hello again!

During LD #20 I did little else than code my framework. I got this far. Apparently I learned nothing and will be using the same framework all over again. My only hope is that I can concentrate more on some actual game programming this time.

So, I’ll try to escape with Gimp and this.

Mac version
Windows version
Source Code

ATM I have a level loader and you can move around on the screen. That’s it, not much to see yet. I’d hoped to be further along by this point, but this isn’t terrible, either.

I do know where I am going with this.

After a frustrating wrestling match with Python (which I lost), I learned two things.

First, stick to the programming I know. With 48 hours, it’s way too frustrating to jump into something too ambitious.

Second, wow you programmers have some skills! It’s crazy how much there is to know… and how much it takes to get a program up and running.

So, I have a basic ‘choose your own adventure’ code written up, which I like.

Instead of a timer, I’m giving the player a limited number of  moves. And it will take a move to uncover more moves, but those moves could work to your benefit, or not. Ummmm… yeah, that makes sense in my head.

Anyway, I’d probably better get some sleep.

Can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with, happy developing!

Woken up, checked the theme, been out of a walk to get the ideas flowing.

I think I have a rough idea of a suitably simple, if not particularly interesting, game to shoot for. Time to get stuck in to code!

Tags: begin, ideas, simple, walk

Being in the UK, LD started at 3am over here. I decided it was best to get a good night’s sleep, and just woke up at a decent time (7am) ready to check the theme and start thinking of ideas.

Took me well over an hour to think of an idea, but I now have the basics of something. Not sure how it’s going to play out yet, but I’ve started putting together a prototype. Doesn’t look very exciting yet, but hey – shapes! Look! They move and everything.

Now, breakfast and onwards!

Tags: Flixel

Fell asleep… awake-ish now… still no idea for my game, but I did have some horrible nightmares about being stabbed in a subway?  Maybe I should make a game about that?  No.  I’m gonna do some stretches and see if any ideas pop out.

Most of the functionality is done except for:

• levels
• level loader
• win/loss conditions
• menus

• better graphics
• sounds
• multiple game modes

Screenshot:

more orbiting, more graphics, more interaction

Tags: progress, screenshot, to do

I wanted to see the theme before comitting to the ‘Im In’ post, i spent about 8hours thinking up an idea for LD20 and eventually failed.

I believe i can do this theme got afew ideas, will do something properly after i get some breakfest

7 odd hours into the competition, and things are looking incredibly bleak. Although I’ve only actually down 2 – 3 hours of coding (and wasted about 4 hours doing things like getting groceries/napping/being annoyed by SFML v2.0 :S). My biggest hurdle, has been SFML 2.0. I downloaded and compiled it about a week ago, and it’s not really documented at all at this stage. It introduces a lot of small changes, which in almost every case has caused broken things. I then spend 20 minutes wondering why the code that logically should work doesn’t, and so today has been more about firefighting bugs, rather than coding any sort of framework.

On top of this, I have work due on Monday that is about to steal me away for the next 18 hours (including 8 hours sleep). In a hope of producing at least something, I’m reducing the scope of the project dramatically. One map, only the size of the screen and one enemy type.

Hey guys,

I just wanted to share my progress so far. There is a demo available here (move with a,d or arrow keys, jump with space – hint: you can double jump).

Escape the evil boxes of doom

i now have a generic enemy type! yay! they seek you, and explode in a fountain of kidneys when shot.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Pretty obvious right?

Well anyone remember the movie “Innerspace”? That’s kind of what I’m going for. You’re inside a craft that’s been shrunk down and it accidentally made its way into the person you love the most. Now you have to escape their body before your pod “Un-shrinks”! Watch out though, the white blood cells are out to get you!

You’ll have to use your cutting tool to cut through bone, white blood cells, fat, muscle and finally skin if you want to escape before time runs out! Good times.

-Byte56

Moved into a new house so I have not got much furniture yet. So I was using my electronic drumkit as a temporary desk-type thing.

Carpal tunnel quickly set in… so I cannibalised the kitchen table and set up in the living room. Much better.

I awoke at 3am, checked the theme and went back to sleep. I dreamt of a fantastic super-hero themed first person Canabalt, but since I’m suck at 3D, I’ll try and distil the awesomeness of that dream into 2D without accidentally making Canabalt… Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Wish me luck.

Tags: deskphoto

Theme is “Escape”, hum? Didn’t see that one coming…

Already have an idea, involving some insanity (escaping your own mind) and whatnot…

Anyway, time to check out the blog, eat breakfast and start cranking some code!

Good luck everyone!

Ah, obligatory deskphoto:

Tags: deskphoto

This is my… third Ludum Dare, I think. I’m gonna use Game Maker again, but this time I’m not going to do a platformer (I promised last time).

I’ll try to make it simple and fun. Good luck everybody!

After struggling with ideas and scrapping (the unscrapping) some content i’ve finally made some actual progress! I got some basic collision detection done, as well as parallax scrolling (see vid) and a component system that seem to do the trick. Next step will be to drop in a few enemies and see to it that they die a horrible death. =)

Well, I guess it’s decided then: I will try my hand at an LD48. I started a few hours ago, but neglected to formally announce it; so here it is:

I’ll be using:

Language: C++

Libraries: SDL (for window management/input/audio/etc…), and OpenGL.

Any textures will probably be made with The GIMP, if I find the time to make any.

Sound effects: sfxr (if I get around to that.)

Right now gLapse is churning away at turning almost 1500 jpgs into a movie.

So far I’ve got OpenGL rendering, and input being processed, as well as movement through my 3D world, and “moving” platforms. Next up is to master the physics of falling onto said platforms, additional game mechanics, and resources. But, it’s late and I should have been sleeping over an hour ago, so I’m calling it a night. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll post my time-lapse so far. Good night!

Tags: C++, GIMP, opengl, SDL, sfxr

So I woke up this morning and almost immediately had an idea! in this game you’ll play as a guy in the near future, arrested for tweeting about planning a water fight. you must escape prison, and recover your water pistol to wet police, and leave puddles for them to slip in!

progress so far is I have a player that can run around (modelled and animated woo) , water pistol that shoots loads of droplets and can be refilled from a pool, and a dash move that lets you smash through stuff that’s weak.

to do next is making droplets form puddles, after that, it’s lots and lots of AI stuff and working on enemies.

anyhoo, getting back to it now! good luck everyone

Not much happening, but things are drawing and I have collisions, map making and grid management going.

Well, I’ve gone and got ready and decided on my game. We’ll see how it goes soon, I guess!

(No. I haven’t done 9 status updates so far. You just don’t understand binary.)

Success! I have coded the tile rendering part of the game. And drew some not-half-bad pixel art!

Lessons so far:

1. Always check if you’re calling things right.
2. Songs from the anime “Lucky Star” are VERY motivating.

Still coding on an ARM tablet/netbook (Asus EEE Pad Transformer) running Ubuntu (no other choice).

not that much to show so far, but still…

1. idea: check
2. IDE: check

starting to visualize now so that i can use taht as my red thread

personal highlight so far: using GraphicsGale for the first time (see Tools) and so far, it’s awesome!

I’ve got two people in the contest now – one has been developing for a bit now, and the second one has just started making games again. Let’s see how they do

If you see some people called Bogdan or Star King around, say hi 😀

Took longer than expected thanks to uncovering an annoying little bug with my uniform binding code. Although, now that it’s stomped and out of the way, curvature of the vortex is in and working (so you can guide your way through.

Curving through space and time

May be starting this a bit late… but just thought i’d give it a try. Just gonna do one of those tilty ball games you used to get in christmas crackers and cereals and stuff. Not the most amazing of ideas, but I should be able to program it, so yay

Tags: ld48

Title Says it all

So, the theme is Escape. I am probably going to use an idea that has been on my mind for some time, and create a context in which it relates to the theme. Although I am still missing some details, I will probably fill those when dealing with the mechanics.

I will probably return to the platformer genre although I hope in a not so classic “style” :). This time I also intend to have different levels. For the time being I will start to write the core engine with support for multiple levels and transition between them. Then I will make the mechanics, using placeholder art, and then finally, make all the art I can get away with and add some sound.

Wish you all good luck

OK so i have been busy working on a lighting system in Java and it has been giving me a major headache, as a result i still havn’t managed to get into the game play but as this is my first blog for the LD allow me to introduce:

Super Kommandant Extreme!, inspired by my favorite TV show Hogan’s Heroes, although the similarities are small, you are in charge of a German prisoner of war camp and it is your job to make sure none of your prisoners escape! better dead then free!, Light is a very limited resource in this game, you only have 4 watch towers to illuminate the area, spotting prisoners is what it is all about.

The game will pit you against increasing numbers and frequency of escapees, giving you an overall ‘efficiency rating’ at the end of each, if your rating drops too low you will be shipped off to the Russian front so i hope you enjoy winter sports! If you would like to have a look at my progress i have been updating  Super Kommandant Extreme! every so often, your welcome to have a look

Just one warning, the lighting is quite inefficient so it might have trouble on some older PCs, i have spent the last 8 hours or so getting it to the point it is at now!

>> LD22 edition
<< LD20 edition

Last time I have already asked what you guys listen to to get you in the mood. So, why not do that again?

Right now I’m listening to some VOCALOID stuff. Later in the playlist, there’s the VVVVVV soundtrack waiting for me, then the SMB soundtrack and finally BIT.TRIP. Yay!

So what are you listening to?

Crap, I took a nap! Anyway, back up, and I hope to get my movement system and some enemy behavior/physics in place. I’m laying the groundwork for a properly flexible map system, with the ability to grab data from external storage, but it’s still early, and I’m more screwing with basic mechanics than anything else. If I can make good progress on the movement system, I’ll take another nap, get up, and start making levels throughout the day.

A bit late, but felt fairly uninspired by the theme. I think I have an idea, so I’m going to use Java, libgdx + lwjgl to take a stab at a game and we’ll see what sort of bloody mess will come out of it.  LD’ing to  Parov Stelar.

Well about an hour in and I’ve got a main loop running with a guy moving around. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d spend next to no time on graphics:

Oddly enough, the guy has the same expression as I do when I look at this game.

Tags: programmer art, screenshot

tonight or tomorrow
flixel
photoshop
god knows if there’ll be audio, probably sfxr

😐  I definitely took too much time to get the collision detection right. Remind me not to do collision from scratch next time. Good luck everyone!

Well I wasn’t expecting escape as the theme. I wanted to do something more scripted this Ludum Dare, so I am going to be making rail shooter. Instead of escaping, the player is a prison guard trying to keep the inmates from escaping. So far I have made the code for the player to move along, and done the art for an inmate. If I can get all the code done on the first day, I can use the second day for level design. A boy can dream can’t he?

I’ve now written down my game concept and design ideas, and am ready to start working on a few basic assets (always nice to start the prototype with something more interesting than coloured boxes!).

My game title is going to be “Icarus Cannon”, and is based (a little loosely) on the Greek mythological character who tried to escape from Crete using a set of wings made from feathers and wax. I’m sure you know the story, but as you might have guessed my version involves a little more bang for your buck. I’m under no illusions about the originality of my gameplay mechanics (it’s been done maaaany times), but hopefully it’ll still be fun!

Hmmm sooo have created a platform that rotates around each axis… Just the ball only rolls if I start rotating it before it falls and hits the platform… why? Probably colliders or something *thinks*

Tags: ld48

Will this camp hold for long? No, it won’t, you have to escape!

(carnivourus mutant plants are going to cover your country/continent/planet and you stand no change against them, but you might be able to win some time and escape)

Got up, looked at theme, had breakfast (plenty of sugar :D), started working on game. Progress is painfully slow to start off with, been mostly working on the GUI and not much on the gameplay itself. Although the gameplay should be quite simple to program (hopefully).

Here’s a quick preview of my game: (Ignore the text in the top left, thats just some debug info…)

Just a quick update. This is my first LD, and enjoying it so far.

Taking a quick break to go grab a pizza and post a screenshot + setup

early setup, getting a ‘pulse’ of sound shooting out, to hinder the escape of the user

and the enemy’s field of vision using the arc technique

Been getting some art ready (damn interchange format!), fiddling some basic materials and lighting, so figured I might as well use LW to make a title screen, as thats the key to any game! 😉

It’s taken me way too long to get these sketches done, and there’s still a ton of stuff to do to them before I can sit them in the game, but that’s the first step out of the way.