Yesterday i spent about 2 hours on thinking about the game, 6 on graphics/programming and 2 on programming a jetpack jump that didn’t want to work. I went to bed roughly at 10.30 p.m., watched a film, thought about new ideas a got some sleep.

Today i woke up at 9 a.m., but this morning i had some things to do so i will start my second day a bit late: it’s 11:30 a.m. here in Italy. I still have 15 hours and a half left and i hope to finish my game in time, i still have to do some programming, add a couple enemies, create levels and work on the entire sound part.

I finished the levels, and now I’m working on the ending.

Spoilers: It won’t be as happy as it looks.

Next up is a bit of effects, then sounds and the *gulps* music…

I have updated Maze Explorers with three actual levels! So now you can beat the game or lose! It was really fun creating the mazes, and not as bad to make the maze files by hand as I feared. Even squashed a couple of bugs.

Now I need to make the game prettier. A friend of mine told me that the game screen was too small, and maybe it kinda is :-/ I´ll try adding a zoom effect when your light level is low.

Anyway, please play and let me know how hard you found the mazes (you want easier mazes? harder mazes? more mazes like these?)

Maze Explorers!

Not much dev time left till the finish line, and it feels like I have a #¤&!-load more to do! I’m starting to get confident about the in-game now though, the graphics are pretty much finished, and almost all the features are implemented, now I need to fix gfx for the title-screen, the shop and the difficulty setting screen, and a nice little game over label. I’m going away to dinner now and after that I’ll try to plan up the finish sprint as good as I can, still haven’t got any sound in the game, something I need to put time on. Anyway, here’s a screen of the in-game as it looks now!

The game can now be played all the way through, and either won or lost. All the character stats, money, and objectives are achievable. Here’s a screenshot of the “daily summary” that tracks your progress:

Wow! I can’t believe how much I’ve got done after the first day. Using an engine (cocos2d) is really paying off. Also the game looks really adorable because i have a real artist helping out.

“Aloneasaurus”

I’ve got the basic game mechanic working — he runs, but instead of making him jump you slide the earth up and down to make him jump or fall on the platforms. That’s right, you are Plate Tectonics! Still needs tons of tuning and content but it’s already fun to play.

Finally!

I finished my game “None Alone”!

Wow, I Worked very hard on it and finally I have a result!

This is my first time on ludum dare so I’ m very proud of myself.

The live stream went pretty good and it was very fun.

Here Is My Entry

Here You Can Watch My Past Live Broadcastings

Here You Can Read My Post Of Day One

Tags: final

So, after 10 hours of rest, one Christmas Tree decorating session and an enjoyable breakfast, we’re back on track. As I booted up the PC this morning, I had a revelation. See, yesterday I was trying to make a zombie character to move slowly towards the player. Problem is, my player is made up of five separate in game “objects” only one of which is in existence at any given time. This allows for shooting in all directions. Hence, to get a zombie to move towards the player, one has to tell it to move towards all five objects. Problem is, if it tries to move towards a non-existent object, the game crashes. Problem. However, today I thought of “Object 29”. It’s an invisible object that moves in the same space at the same time and speed as the player object. When you press the arrows to move your player, it moves too, staying in the same place as the player object. I simply programmed the Zombies to move towards it, et voila! Of course, the zombies then moved towards the object on creation, but when it moved they still aimed for the same spot. In the end, I made the zombies reset all behavior every half second or so. That fixed it. I’ll just add some art and we’ll be ready to go.

Of course, that brings me onto my second problem. My game is shaping up very well. 2 player mode is nearly ready (needs some character tweaking, a menu of it’s own and 3 maps to play on). As soon as I finish enemy creation, I just need to assemble some levels for single player. The message is that “I have too much time”. So I thought I’d use it to brush up my art. If I’m honest, the game art is crap. The mines, doors and walls look ok, but everything else sucks. My style sucks. I need to fix it, badly. I’m not sure if I can.

Hey! Anyone care to try this? The game is here: Necropolis . Lots of things to do for the game including instructions. The goal is to get all scrolls in the level while avoiding the enemies. If the enemies get too near the light you take damage. Thanks!

Most of the engine is coded, I just need to come up with some fancy UI for reading notes/journals to add to the “abandoned town” idea. Starting to move into level design now.

You guys are probably wondering what my game is. Well, you’re a Mars rover that, after having lost contact with Earth, stumble upon a small Martian village that is long since abandoned. There’s also a sweet Martian spacecraft that you find, but it’s broken. You need to find the missing pieces to leave the town. Along the way you’ll find notes and journals left behind by the people who used to live in the town. I got my inspiration from this xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/695/

Hopefully I’ll actually finish everything… I’m going to get some sleep soon, but I’m not sure if I want to work on level design or the reading interface, but I guess both have to be done in 15 hours so it really doesn’t matter.

Oh yeah and just before I go to bed, I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve been hosting all the code/content on github this entire time, feel free to watch the repo for further development tomorrow or look at the history to see how my game evolved from a blank OpenTK window: https://github.com/Robmaister/RoversSpirit

Some minor events and such programmed into the game, other than that I mostly worked on prettying up the tiles a bit because the solid colors were bothering me…

I need to add in some dangers to the game now…  I’m thinking a quick random battle encounter system would work best for the time I have.

Got my version 1.0 up for “The LD Lament”.

Can get it here http://www.mediafire.com/?km314pp01akn6 plus screenshots (and old builds). Made with XNA (and c#)

Tomorrow I am to add more areas and thus make a larger game.

So I’ve almost finished all the background stuff to get the game working, meaning I may be able to start on the art for it all soon *yay*

After feeling a bit peckish though I decided to heat up the left over beans and hot dogs from last night and have some yummy beans on toast.

From the sounds of it, it isn’t as epic as Cptalbertwesker’s incoming breakfast, but you can’t beat some good beans on buttery toast

Tags: foodphoto ld22 ludum dare ld48

After a slow start to LD22 it seems my entry is picking up the pace and starting to look more like a game – and as they say: a picture is worth a thousand words!

After some initial stupid decisions, very little progress yesterday, and a lack of motivation today, I have decided that’s my lot for LD22.  It’s always good to try out new things, but I think I just took on too much this time, so my plans for next time are:

• Choose a toolchain I already know well.  XNA or flex are a good choice, or learn Unity3D for next time … don’t try and learn Unity3D and make the game within the 48 hours
• Learn some basic blender 3D modelling in advance.  Too many of my ideas would work better in 3D, and although I can program in 3D, I can’t even do placeholder models just now.
• Do some warm-ups and dry-runs to give me a better idea of what I can achieve in the time.  My ideas tend to be far too ambitious, so I end up either bailing out as I have no chance, or because I’ve cut my idea back so far that I lose motivation for it.

For all those still going for the compo/jam, good luck, and have fun! 😀

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqGJ2FyC8Wo&feature=youtu.be

My game got some really basic gameplay, some art and a great music track. 14 hours left to polish all this, I’ll try to add some animations, SFXs, and a final surprise

Play it here: http://lorancou.free.fr/bulk/lonekitty/

Well, second day and the end is quite here. I will not have some fancy graphics, but the gameplay is quite fun already .

Here is a small preview of what is my game :

Time to post a bit, I’ve been so busy bingeing on crap food  working on my game, which, by the way, is a dating simulator! Won’t be as complex as I would’ve liked it to be, but time’s limited… Here’s a screen that makes no sense:

More work on the map, added a village some roads and changed the sea/beach area. Also has the Gui WIP and a course a tentacle!

The map TBH is too big, too much walking towards your target, but its does invoke the feeling of lonliness, you feel far from the company of the villagers which fits the theme so I’ve decided to leave it in. Means the initial play impact might get some people to switch off before anything happens but a theme is a theme!