You guys and your impromptu compos.

From the mailing list:

Hey,

It’s time for some more game compo good times! The compo is going to be on the weekend of Feb. 23rd. Since it’s a warm-up, there won’t be exact start and end times, just show up and have fun! Theme voting will be on the website prior to the compo.

Join #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org
www.ludumdare.com/compo/

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

I’ll be back soon. I’m just trying to minimize my distractions for the next week or so.

(02:11:23 PM) philhassey: the theme voting will be in the channel .. starting around 6 hours before the compo
(02:11:39 PM) philhassey: we’ll come up with some themes around that time
(02:11:46 PM) philhassey: and then i’ll post a voting thing on my website ..
(02:11:50 PM) philhassey: theme will be released at the start
(02:12:00 PM) philhassey: then you’ve got 48 hours to do whatever ..
(02:12:45 PM) philhassey: basic idea is to spend around 12 of those hours working ..
(02:12:51 PM) philhassey: not as “intense” as a real 48 hour compo ..
(02:13:08 PM) philhassey: entries won’t be judged, but we’ll post them on the website so there is easy access and people can leave comments and junk
(02:13:18 PM) Hectigo: Sounds good
(02:13:31 PM) philhassey: i’ll post that on the site ..
(02:13:31 PM) jolle: and award trophies ^_^
(02:13:33 PM) philhassey: yeah
(02:13:37 PM) philhassey: trophies are a must
(02:14:21 PM) RobotGuy: Thanks, that’s helped alot.

Tags: rules

Copied from my Dev Blog

So eventually you’re going to have to put in moving/walking/talking elements of various varieties in most any game. Maybe they are lemmings. Maybe they are AI controlled bot opponents in an FPS. Or maybe they are soldiers in an RTS, or enemies in a hack and slash. In any case it’s daunting to add these gameplay elements because the behaviour will ultimately require so much tweaking and experimentation. Where do you start?

Carefully creating a system for managing/handling such creatures is… somewhat uninspiring work. And worse, what kind of result do you get? Did you end up forgetting some crucial detail, or do you get a very complex, neural-net-enhanced AI that just acts stoopid? Good luck!

When you see your little guys moving around, only then do you start to see what practical changes you can make to their behaviour. It doesn’t mean you can’t have larger scale frameworks in place, it’s just that even with these frameworks (e.g., pathfinding) it’s not too obvious how to code the heuristics until you are into.

This brings me to my Golden Rule of Adding Moving Gameplay Elements:

First, just add something that stands still and you can zap.

Of course, “zap” might stand for anything. Maybe zap means clicking an RTS unit. Or talking to an NPC. But your first implementation should not worry about movement or anything. It should just create the actual unit, place it. You can start to work out your enemy placement/spawning system at this point, or start to think about how they will behave. But either way, what you really need before you can get started on any practical level is to get it placed. And in order to do that most easily, just forget everything else that will have to go into it for the time being.

I would do well to remember this in the future. This way of thinking avoids me spending all kinds of time mulling over millions of options without anything to start experimenting with. With a purely dumb element placed, purely dumbly, I am able to start the kind of wheedling experimentation neccesary to make it work.

Tags: AI, bots, enemies

Hi! my name is Goldbuick! I just recently showed up on the ludumdare radar! I’m looking forward to participating in my first compo and I wanted to post my tool of choice.

http://qixl.demiverse.com/

Qixl currently runs on Windows. It does not run under Wine. Ports to other OS’es are planned.

Qixl is a specialized lua interpreter based off of luajit.
Basically it’s lua + additional built-in classes to manage simple graphics, audio, music and mouse/keyboard input.

Tags: qixl low-fi pixel engine

Homepage has been padded with another couple of old projects – go see

This time around it’s a semi-usable animation editor (for making PNG images move around in a neat way) and a video smoothing experiment (no download, but lots of text and a demo video!)

Nooo! How dare you be Wednesday already Time! I’m not ready yet! Noooo!

It’s all your fault Time! Blamed is you!

Only around 24 hours to go before the warm-up, so now is a good time to know that the blog works.

Everyone ready?

I hope the theme is moon mice.

Here is a link to my entry for the first 48 hour Ludum Dare competition. It was Freighter Defense Force. Kind of weak, but still one of my better ones.

http://www.xmission.com/~sgray/ld48/game48.html

A screen shot is here:

Ok! I’m here. I’m ready. I made it.

My goal for this weekend isn’t so much to build a game, but to do a Lua implementation. I powered through the literature and some articles earlier in the week, so I know what I want to do with it (object specialization scripting and an experiment with cut-scene scripting). And if I’m lucky, my test scripts might turn in to a mini game, for the compo.

Fun fun!

Ok! I’m here. I’m ready. I made it.

My goal for this weekend isn’t so much to build a game, but to do a Lua implementation. I powered through the literature and some articles earlier in the week, so I know what I want to do with it (object specialization scripting and an experiment with cut-scene scripting). And if I’m lucky, my test scripts might turn in to a mini game, for the compo.

Fun fun!

While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you 
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a 
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front 
of you.  

>

Tags: adventure, D, humor, non-entry, silly, surprising, text, text adventure, unexpected, weird

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

– Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

– Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

– A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

– A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

– A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (“Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

Tags: idea, surprise, text adventure, web game

Well, I was rather disappointed with the theme, but I managed to get a game going. It’s called “Invasion of the Blobs”. Earth is taken by “surprise” when a mass of “weird” blobs have been spotted by a high-range space satellite orbiting Earth, and “unexpectedly” a top-secret spaceship fighter is deployed to take them out.
Screenshot is below. Enjoy!

Tags: prerelease, pygame, pymike, python, screenshot

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Tags: idea, intro, log, Mr Head, screenshot

Well, I spent day 1 playing WoW, watching TV, and trying to come up with an idea with no success.  Now it’s day 2, and things are coming along really smoothly:

There’s more functionality done than you can see in the shot.  You can move around the (two-room at the moment) maze.  If there were items, you could use them, drop them, and combine them, but not pick them up yet.  So as you can see, there are doors leading off into space.  If you go that way, you actually stay in the room you’re in, but an edit section will pop up on the screen for the room you tried to enter.  I haven’t done that yet, but you’ll be able to make your own description and layout there.  Then that place is marked “pending” as it’s emailed to me for verification (to check for language and such).  Pending areas can’t be built in or entered, and there’s a “nifty” graphic indicating them.

This is going to be a sight to see!  I can see great potential for impassable situations, but that’s all theoretical right now.  If I didn’t include items and just had riddles, we’d be good, except for one thing – I just know shortly after startup, we’ll end up in a state where all possible paths are blocked off.  But I can always manually throw in doors if that happens.  I could just verify that there is always at least one door leading into the void, but that’d be a very heavy database churn to do.

Tags: maze, progress, screenshot

Here’s the first source release of “Invasion of the Blobs”:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.1-src.zip

Here’s a look at my new menu:

Tags: pygame, pymike, python, release

So we are halfway through the event, but I dont think I’m halfway through what I need to do. with any luck though I should have something that at least remotely relates to the theme. and if not at least I’ll have some pretty looking pixels for ya

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

Tags: bouncy, cows, log, screenshot

Version 0.2 source code is available here:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.2-src.zip

Here’s a screenshot of the boss:

Tags: invasionoftheblobs, pygame, pymike, python

Yah, so I might not have a game, but diving into the wild world of OpenGL all the same!! Look at my peachy fire effect:

Tags: fire effects, opengl

So here it is, what I’ve been working a bit on. Only spent about 2 1/2 hours of actual coding, art, and planning on this one. Will hopefully have collision-detected objects, jumps that launch you way into the air, and a timer & map at the bottom


Woot 1970 Cutlass Extreme!

Tags: Ludumdare 10.5

This theme was horrible to think up ideas for, I mean, games usually rely on the player expecting what happens. However, I did write a small platformer with just one level which tries to incorporate this idea of having something unexpected happen, so that the player then has to think up a way around.

I’m not sure i’ll continue working on it, as i’m not terribly excited about the game idea. Meh.

It requires .NET2.0, XNA 2.0, shader 1.1 and updated DirectX dll’s ( )

Try it here

I’m not sure how this happened, but we seem to have managed to democratically voted in a theme which is unanimously hated. Last night, after about an hour of developing and throwing away bad ideas (too much content, dead boring, and lame, respectively) I finally came up with what I’m now going with.

I came to this idea through a roudabout manner, but what it really boils down to is asteroids. One difference, though, is that the asteroids have behaviour. Instead of simply coming apart when hit, the asteroids react in a (surprising!) manner. Some retaliate, some just act silly, and some in turn shoot at the other asteroids. You don’t know which is which until you try shooting at them, so you’ve got to be careful!

Of course, now for the long part, implementation. So far I’ve progressed to the point where I can move around and shoot:

I hope I’ll have time to finish, I’m going out for dinner tonight and tomorrow my family is eating out to celebrate my birthday (which, strangely enough, is today).

No need for another screen, it would look almost identical to the last.  But big big progress.  It’s almost entirely done, and I’m quitting for the night.  Now, you can walk around in the world, pick up and drop items, and create new rooms.  The new rooms even include riddles and the use of items, and new items in them.  Riddles and using items are not implemented, but the presence of new items is.  The remaining stuff is probably an hour’s work.  Then clean up, polish, security enhancements (the big issue with doing a webgame as opposed to a single player one!), and it’s all done.  That’s going to be the best part – seeing people stuff it full of new rooms and insanity.  This is a really simple project, but it’s going to be a fun one!

Tags: surprise, text adventure, web game

Here is what my game looks like right now. Some fractal trees, some guys and a ladder. You can knock the head off the other guy with a spear if you like. Oh, and by the way, it’s just a coincidence that he is looking happy. He actually is terrified.

Tags: fractal trees, smileys, spear, weird

Well, end of day 1 and I’ve quite a lot done but not as much as I had hoped. I have a game that allows the player to fly around a psychedelic tube controlled by the mouse and bounce off the walls. Currently, there is nothing else to do which is the next thing that I need to deal with.

The basic premiss is that you have having the weirdest day of your life. You’d just got a job at a research lab as an ‘Inventory Controller’, half way through the tour you were cold-clocked and when you woke up you found out that the ‘inventory’ you are to control is in the labs Synchrotron and consists of exotic elementary particles that they need shunted in to different storage rings.

Not the best match for the theme I’ll admit, but I thought that it was a really weird idea for a game so…

Decided to try to do something in 3D for pretty much the first time this Ludum Dare (other than some very basic tests and such). Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Just needs some gameplay now..

So still no real “gameplay” elements, but that should be coming in tonight.

I’m thinking to stick to the weird theme, somehow hitting cows with the 1970 cutlass either speeds you up, turns you into a cow car, gives you bonus points, or sprays milk or something?

The ramps will also launch your car into the air for a little bit of boosted speed, but the trade off is since you’re in the air you cannot get any powerups.

Quick screen of updates, look almost the same but I can also load custom levels now

Okay, added in being able to run into cows, the Cowabunga bonus if you hit 5 cows in a row, and the ability to launch off the ramps. Your wheels do not properly update with the car, but its just a matter of hacking in the code. I didn’t compile the py2exe because it becomes gigantic, I’ll use pymikes setup and make it smaller later… sleep now.

http://www.geocities.com/cthulhuluke/1970Cutlass0.3.zip 

I now have a scoring system, combos, and lifes, so you can get game over. And announcements. Here’s a screenshot:

What’s missing yet is some effect for non-bounced cows, lip sync for Mr Head up in the corner when announcements are made, and some balancing.

Things that would be nice, but aren’t top priority yet, is a highscore table (for scores, most drowned, highest combo etc), a nifty pause feature, a skip intro thingy, and possibly web scores, only that probably won’t happend during this weekend anyway.

Tags: combos, log, Mr Head, screenshot

Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

Tags: arcade, black and white, bouncy, C++, combos, cows, farm, final, GLFW, gravity, humor, intro, lip-sync, moo, Mr Head, opengl, silly, weird, Windows

Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

Tags: arcade, black and white, bouncy, C++, combos, cows, farm, final, GLFW, gravity, humor, intro, lip-sync, moo, Mr Head, opengl, silly, weird, Windows

All done! Already filled with lots of user submissions. I can already tell that making sure submissions work right is going to be murder. But we shall see! It’s pretty awesome already, with multi-part puzzles made by different people.

Play now: http://hamumu.com/maze.php

It requires a Dumb Account to play, but those are free and the most fun thing in the world, so you would be a fool to pass that up.

Tags: final, maze, mysql, php, text adventure, web game

This is my final release of “Invasion of the Blobs”. I’m not completely happy with it, but oh well… there’s not many changes to the game, but a windows binary is now available. Have fun playing!

Source: http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-final-src.zip

Windows: http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-final-win32.zip

Tags: pygame, pymike, python

I think this ended up being more of a tech demo than anything. Regardless it’s a silly little thing that could be expanded in the future. I didn’t realize I had ADD so bad

http://whitlark.net/share/ld10.5.zip

arrow keys, x = left punch, c = right punch

Tags: final, qixl

I made a few more updates to my game, so this is the real final release. Enjoy!

The story of “Invasion of the Blobs”:

A satellite orbiting Earth detects a mass of weird lifeforms rapidly heading towards the sun, that seem to collect around a massive green lifeform. Alarmed, and taken completely by surprise, Earth deploys a top-secret spacecraft to destroy weird mass of blobs, and the strange lifeform they collect around.

Source: http://pymike93.googlepages.com/iob-src-final2.zip
Windows: http://pymike93.googlepages.com/iob-win32-final2.zip

Tags: final, pygame, pymike, python

This is the final version of my game. It’s probably, hard, cruel, unbalanced and difficult. It’s wierd and not just because it makes no sense to make a text based defense game like this.

The final file

Tags: CLI, crazy, defense, final, Ludumdare

Considered doing something for the compo, but kept getting into other stuff (fun stuff, important stuff, interesting stuff) so time ended up running out. I decided to make a mockup screenshot instead, of something weird that could have been. Maybe. Anyway, behold:

Oh, I also happened to make an asteroids game during the compo… didn’t mean to do that, but technically I guess it could have been an entry. Not quite weird or unexpected perhaps, but at least it’s asteroids.  Windows-only.

http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/asteroids.zip

Now where’s the Inquisition game? Me want play!!!

Tags: asteroids, fat people, mockup, pixels

Ok, I decided to call it ‘ULTIMATE VENGANCE POWER 4: THE LEMON OF JUSTICE, and as a result spent an hour making the title ^_^

anyhoo, instructions are in the game.

the .exe:
ULTIMATE_VENGANCE_POWER_4.zip

the .fla(source):
UVP4_source.fla

Tags: final, LEMON OF JUSTICE

Hey, so here it is. I managed to learn the basics of OpenGL and integrated with tinypy for a basic gamelett. I totally cheated by recycling one of my old games for the logic in this one. Which, I guess is cool, because I was able to get all that code working with tinypy. It uncovered a couple bugs which I fixed. Anyway, on with the game:

Download the goods – click on “main.exe” to run.
linux folks check out svn://www.imitationpickles.org/ld105/trunk ; python build.py

Tags: final, opengl, tinypy

Howdy!

Here is my entry. It’s basically a cross between robotfindskitten and a generic platformer.

DOWNLOAD: http://kittay.ca/kittay-fydo-LD105.zip (1.0 mb)

Written in C, uses OpenGL. Didn’t have time to make a linux binary, sorry team.

I’m planning on doing a post-compo version, with bugfixes and better level graphics. Also, I’ll incorporate the other 3 mini-songs that I recorded, too. 😉

Enjoy!

EDIT: Note that I’ve created a launchpad project for kittay. So you can file bugs there! Yay!

Tags: cats, final, kittens, kitties, LD #10.5 - Unexpected/Surprise - 2008, opengl, platformer, robot, robotfindskitten, SDL, SDL_mixer

Heh, so I still haven’t really found a point to the game, so for now you are a 1970 cutlass trying to collect cows before you get to the finish. If you hit a cat, you lose a cow, because hitting cats is bad! You can also launch off of ramps, which can either be good or bad, depending.

Download Linux/Source here –

Source Version

Download Windows py2exe here –

Windows Version

Tags: cars, cutlass, final

I’ve finally finished and it is actually a completed game (unlike normal where it’s missing a few vital things such as game play or sounds). It’s a python / pygame / pyOpenGL game but I haven’t managed to build a .exe version as there is some bizarreness with pyOpenGL and py2exe which it is far too late try and fix.

You can download it from http://www.patenall.org/temporary/LudumDare/ExoticInventory.zip, it was developed on Mac OS X but I’ve tested it on windows (while cursing py2exe out) and it appears to work

Notes:

Best method is to come along side a particle by looking at 90deg to you direction of travel and using shift + arrow keys. Then when you’re going at the same speed and are targeted on it shoot it several times.

To turn just use the arrows keys. If you hold shift you will accelerate in that direction so you can strafe. And oh yes, your shots have momentum and push you back when you fire.

Tags: final

Bit of a late entry for me, but oh well, here it is anyway:

Download: cubetendo.zip (Updated with trivial fix for ATI cards)

Windows exe and source code included (compiles in Linux). Requires OpenGL 2.0. If it crashes, try running it from a console (updated the zip with a bat file that does this).

Tags: 3D, cubes, cubetendo, final, linux, opengl, SDL, Windows

So, I’ve got something to submit (finally)! Not as polished as I’d like, but it’s pretty fun. It’s similar to asteroids, except instead of falling apart helplessly the asteroids fight back. Give it a try! WASD to move, IJKL to shoot.

Source (Install mzscheme and run it with “mzscheme -u black-box.ss”. libSDL, libSDL_image, and libSDL_mixer are required.)

Windows Binary (All libraries included.)

Tags: final, scheme

Some more project additions on my shiny new site. New design really makes adding stuff a lot more convenient compared to what I had before. Actually one of the updates is a project entry on that very system; SPCMS (the morbid can have fun looking through some source code on that one)

Mainly though, I finally got around to releasing Nitro Butts – an old game from 2005 that me and my brother made out of oldschool boredom. It’s actually quite a bit of fun and you can even do co-op if you have a gamepad and additional human around.

Tags: butts, co-op, music, pixels, retro, robotron

Some more project additions on my shiny new site. New design really makes adding stuff a lot more convenient compared to what I had before. Actually one of the updates is a project entry on that very system; SPCMS (the morbid can have fun looking through some source code on that one)

Mainly though, I finally got around to releasing Nitro Butts – an old game from 2005 that me and my brother made out of oldschool boredom. It’s actually quite a bit of fun and you can even do co-op if you have a gamepad and additional human around.

Tags: butts, co-op, music, pixels, retro, robotron