HOORAY! You all have until 6PM PDT on Sunday (0100 UTC on Monday) to turn in your entries! To submit your entry, just post a blog post here on LD, in the category “Mini LD #1″. In the Tags section, put “final” (along with whatever tags are appropriate) to indicate it’s your final entry. Your post should include a screenshot, and a download link for your game. Please use ZIPs, not installers! There’s no hosting for your game here, but if you don’t have a place, you can use http://ludumtoybox.sophiehoulden.com/ graciously provided by GirlFlash.

With all that said, what’s the theme?!?! Well, keep in mind this isn’t LD. You don’t just take one word and interpret it as you like. Instead, you need to follow the recipe given below! And here it is:

VERSUS

Select two extremely famous and iconic characters (real or fictional, human or non-human). They must be well-known to a reasonable number of people. They should be as utterly unrelated as possible. Make a game entitled “A vs. B” (where A and B are the names of the two characters, duh). The actual type of game and content then should be inspired by what kind of gameplay you need for those two to be in conflict! It does not need to be a 2-player game, or any kind of head-to-head thing (like a fighting game). For example, one character might have a base, and the other has an airplane, so it’s a vertical shooter. Whatever fits for the characters! Existing example: Bambi Vs. Godzilla (not a game, but to give you an idea of the concept). Made-up Example: Frankenstein vs. Ghandi.

Go to it, minions! Make me a VERSUS GAME!

Tags: theme

Pov picked some random numbers, and I choose two pygame projects to VS as my entry.

Soccor game: http://pygame.org/project/630/

VS

Vector pods: http://pygame.org/project/650/

So I’ll mix these two pygame games together and see what I get.  Quickest idea for an LD entry I’ve had… evar!

Well, I spent all last night thinking up VS ideas, then watching TV and thinking of more, then when TV was over I said, “that’s it.  I’m going with Schrodinger Vs. Pavlov”.  I thought it’d be cool, an army of dogs that you can steer around with a bell cursor, vs. a guy who can place boxes that contain pop-up cats that may be alive or dead.  Then I was thinking it would be like a board game, where the Pavlov guy has cards with various dogs and bells and things, and the Schrodinger guy has dice with 3 alive-cat faces and 3 dead-cat faces.  The closest I got to an actual idea was that Schrodinger could commit his dice to various battles, and hope they were enough when actually rolled.  It didn’t actually make a game, though.

So this morning I woke up still with no ideas that worked, and finally decided it had to be the very first idea that struck me as solid.  I didn’t want to do a platformer, but here I go anyway: Miyamoto Vs. Yamamoto.  You’ll hop from ship to ship, bouncing on their various parts to sink them, then hop off before you sink with them.  It won’t be Mario, because you’ll be dodging fire directly aimed at you by the cannons and other oddities, and the ‘defeat each ship’ motif is a little different.  Got some ideas, anyway!  Time to build a ship editor!

Tags: dice, ideas, miyamoto, pavlov, schrodinger, ships, yamamoto

Super Miyamoto!  I don’t have the foggiest clue how to actually animate him,  but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.  I really need to start on some code, I think…

Tags: miyamoto

Super Miyamoto!  I don’t have the foggiest clue how to actually animate him,  but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.  I really need to start on some code, I think…

Tags: miyamoto

Okay, there’s now a ship editor that loads and saves!  You can’t actually choose which tile to use (of course, there is only one tile… but you can’t erase it!), but you can load, save, and exit.  And it shows you the waterline.

Pretty classy ship, huh?

Tags: editor, miyamoto, ship, yamamoto

So I’m going for Retro DOS epicness! Commander Keen vs. Captain Comic! I’ve never actually played Captain Comic, but Commander Keen is one of my favorite game sagas, and I’ve always wanted to make a fan-game of him.

The game is going to be an RPG (hopefully). You’ll explore a planet (Mars, I guess?) in search of Captain Comic, who has raised the Vorticons in revolt against Keen. (yes its lame, and I might change that later on) When you touch an enemy, it will go into a battle mode like Mario & Luigi (GBA and DS) and Paper Mario (GC).

I started drawing the graphics last night, and I’ve got most of the “overworld” graphics done. Here’s a screenie of my progress:

And yes, everything is collidable and there’s a camera that works I’m using my Flibber game engine to make it.

Anyway, I’ll see ya all around. Good luck with your games

Tags: captain comic, commander keen, epic, MiniLD, retro, way cool

Thought I would make a post before I got some sleep.

I decided to do a “defend your castle” game where you have to help Tom Cruise protect the Church of Scientology from “Anonymous”. I’m still not sure if Anonymous is allowed, but if it’s not I can easily change it to Oprah. 😛

WARNING: Programmer art…

So far I just have the bare bones of the game (killable enemies and a killable castle) but hopefully tomorrow I will have time to add a weapon upgrade system and a few other goodies.

Tags: anonymous, awesty, MiniLD, tom cruise

Smoothed out the edges

Tags: captain comic, commander keen, progress

This is my first Ludum Dare. I really like the theme and rules so I jumped in this time.

… so I stalled right out of the gate trying to pick a good pair of characters to face-off against each other. I had all kinds of ideas. My trouble was picking one and sticking to it. It’s definitely a fun theme. I picked Frogger from the 80’s arcade game and Master Shake from Aqua Team Hunger Force.

I like frogs and Shake is the perfect villain.

I picked a single-screen 1-on-1 duke-it-out style game with projectile and close quarters weapons. I haven’t done a 2D tile game before so I kept it simple: no scrolling, 1 screen, no OpenGL acceleration. it looks like the OpenGL acceleration isn’t that rough to add. I won’t have time tough.

So far I have a primitive particle system, my 2D tile drawing and loading from text files, and a simple sprite animated character. The mouse is used to aim the projectile weapon and fire. Keyboard moves left/right, jumping, change weapons, and can also fire weapons (as well as left mouse button).

The big stuff still to do:
very primitive collisions – rectangle-rectangle at tile level for jumping & weapon damage.
sound and sound content – this is a biggie for me. I haven’t messed with sound much before.
Draw Master Shake sprites
Draw “slap fight” hand-to-hand combat tile/sprite animations & add hand-to-hand game logic

Tags: ANSI C, Detox, mingw, platformer, SDL

whoever wins… I get a friendship bracelet!

I’m definately starting a bit late, so I dont know if I can get anything done in time, but the idea is that you play as pedro and try and get people to vote for you before they are attacked by facehuggers (^.^)

Tags: aliens, pedro, versus

You can know enter the shop and upgrade your weapons at the end of each round. Still need to add the ability to buy sentries and repairmen.

Spent way too much time on the gun graphics (not including the rocket launcher and cruise cannon) and doubt I will have enough time to finish the game since I have to work tomorrow and will have to get a good sleep and wake up early. :\

Tags: cannon, cruise, MiniLD, shop, weapon

And there’s a good reason!  I spent at least 8 hours of yesterday stuck at one spot in the game – dealing with the + and – signs of camera position versus ship position (the ships are like individual tile maps, but those tile maps are placed in the world… kind of inspired by DrPetter’s Swarming Of The Machines!) versus player position versus waterline.  It is a trivial problem, solved in the end by swapping some signs around and actually watching which way things move (or, more quickly, by drawing a simple diagram, which I never did).  The reason I spent all day on it was that I was watching TV and not even trying to think about it.  Just haphazardly flicking values every so often.  I don’t think I’m very dedicated to this project.  But I’m gonna try some more today!

Once I finally stopped TV for a second though, I nailed that and now I have Miyamoto running and jumping along a set of 3 boats, quite successfully.  He has no animation, but whatever.  I think I will add enemies and things you can stomp to sink the boats today.  I’m not feeling very pressured.  The unofficialness is getting to me!

Tags: miyamoto, slacker

And there’s a good reason!  I spent at least 8 hours of yesterday stuck at one spot in the game – dealing with the + and – signs of camera position versus ship position (the ships are like individual tile maps, but those tile maps are placed in the world… kind of inspired by DrPetter’s Swarming Of The Machines!) versus player position versus waterline.  It is a trivial problem, solved in the end by swapping some signs around and actually watching which way things move (or, more quickly, by drawing a simple diagram, which I never did).  The reason I spent all day on it was that I was watching TV and not even trying to think about it.  Just haphazardly flicking values every so often.  I don’t think I’m very dedicated to this project.  But I’m gonna try some more today!

Once I finally stopped TV for a second though, I nailed that and now I have Miyamoto running and jumping along a set of 3 boats, quite successfully.  He has no animation, but whatever.  I think I will add enemies and things you can stomp to sink the boats today.  I’m not feeling very pressured.  The unofficialness is getting to me!

Tags: miyamoto, slacker

I started toying around a bit.. maybe I’ll submit an entry a bit later, if I get not distracted from coding. My idea is.. help a yellow python eat perls. The “versus” should be obvious, especially from the screen below

This might be my record for least finished LD entry (of ones where I actually bothered to submit anything), but here it is! There’s no game here, you can just hop around on 3 ships a little bit and then exit. PRESS Q TO QUIT! Z is jump, and arrows move.

You can download the awesome windows EXE here: Miyamoto Download (712kb)

Enjoy your hopping!

Tags: final

This might be my record for least finished LD entry (of ones where I actually bothered to submit anything), but here it is! There’s no game here, you can just hop around on 3 ships a little bit and then exit. PRESS Q TO QUIT! Z is jump, and arrows move.

You can download the awesome windows EXE here: Miyamoto Download (712kb)

Enjoy your hopping!

Tags: final

Done, multiplayer only… read the readme.

BlocksOfTron

Tags: Add new tag, final

Well, I haven’t done anything except moo at #ludumdare, and come up with a few ideas:

verse versus verse – noah vs moses using some quotes from: http://www.cracked.com/article_15699_9-most-badass-bible-verses.html as attacks.

triangle man versus particle man – from the good ol ‘particle man’ by ‘they might be giants’. simple fighting game, particle man is indicated by a magnifying glass and just can’t win.

? vs ? – type names for each player and the first google image search result for each name is the sprite used for that player.

I’m imagining these as basic ‘street fighter 2’ type fighting games, with juwhich is among my least favourite genres, so I haven’t been too motivated to code anything. Triangle man would be easy and a bit comical, mehbe.

Well I’m drinking coffee so that’s a start.

Update: oops, thought I posted this yesterday. well it’s sunday morning and no code, so I wouldn’t expect anything from me.