I couldn’t think of anything else, but I decided the game should be about you in a group of some kind, and early on everyone dies but you, and you have to get them revived somehow.

So that evolved from a Final Fantasy style rpg (which I don’t have time for) into a top down Zelda style thing. Right now I have levels loading, and a player who shoots and moves around. I’m using the Flixel Power tools and the DAME level editor, and I’ve made tons of progress.

DAME has some quirks, there are a few lines that I have to fix every time I export, but it’s been mostly cooperative.

Tomorrow I’ll focus on creating enemies to shoot (or today? hmm)

I also want to crack at having the player start with the Ultimate Weapons and Loadout (since he’s using his fallen comrad’s weapons) and then downgrading as the game goes on. I think Yatzee Ben Crowshaw postulated that this would be an interesting mechanic, instead of aquirering gear you give it up as you go along.

I also want a crack at having something on the level of Ico, where it’s linear but at a key moment you’re given a choice and you simply MUST choose the hard path. While it’s required to take it, it’s appears to be up to the player.

ha, I’ll probably not get that far.

For LD22 I’ve spent a lot more time drinking and lot less time coding than I did for LD21, but I do have a pretty solid idea now, thanks to the input of my lovely wife <3

I've decided to code this project in lua using love2d, something I haven't used before but seems pretty solid. I saw a good number of entries in the last LD using it, and I've used lua plenty in World of Warcraft addon development – easily enough to be very familiar with syntax and common functions. The Love2d framework syntax is simple and shouldn't be a problem, and I'm looking forward to getting to work. Now though, i've had far too much Jack Daniels to be productive and am spending my time listening to music and watching IRC, commenting on the progress of others. I should get some sleep and get up tomorrow to work on the project.

Fun times all round, good luck to all, sleep approaches!

After a few hours of work, I managed to do:

• A very basic tile map
• A character that moves around that tile map
• Other characters following him in a conga line
• Variable line-of-sight

Time to get some sleep

Tomorrow I will try to package this, and begin map interactions (walls, etc)

The characters walk in a conga line, and there is a range for light!

Yay!

NORAMAN ver. 0.2

So far so good. Before I get a couple hours of sleep, here is a new screenshot:

Good night and good luck everyone.

Once upon a time there was a man with a brilliant idea for the theme “Alone.”
That man later that evening ate some dinner.

Delicious

I ate that around two hours ago. So far I’ve got the basic story figured out and the utility code all cleaned up and ready for use (hopefully).

If you’re wondering how the story goes, well here you are:

You are the Captain Onyxbeard of the mighty ship of Thunderbolt.
Your crew committed the act of mutiny, and abandoned you on a mysterious island!
The only items you have in your possession are a cutlass, an empty bottle of rum, and a journal.

Tell me what you think in a comment. <3 (oh yes.)

Tags: foodphoto

Cause I don’t want to commit to a name right away I code named my game “Project Stark”.

It’s a lonely space adventure. Ideas are still coming in but focusing on the fact that you are completely ‘alone’.

Here’s my eclipse window.

Initially I wasn’t too thrilled about the theme, but I think I came up with an idea that I like.

While brainstorming, I kept coming back to the idea of a tiny micro-organism swimming though a vast ocean. There is tons of life around it, but the scale of everything is so tremendous that it could just swim and swim and never find anything else.

I rejected this idea a few times because I thought it would feel too similar to flOw. I think I’ve come up with a unique take on it though.

You’ll play the game as a little amoeba creature, all alone in the enormous ocean. You have to collect food. Once you collect a certain amount of food you have enough energy to spawn a new creature. The type of creature that is created depends on the types of food you eat.

I really want to make this feel open-ended and exploratory, but again I fear that it will end up feeling like a flOw rip-off, so we’ll see how it goes. I might end up adding a time limit or enemies or something else that will end the game.

Progress has been pretty good so far. 4.5 hours in and I’ve prototyped the basic logic and movement. Tomorrow I will try to refine the gameplay ideas and start working on some art and sounds hopefully.

Here’s some ugly placeholder art:

See you in the morning!

Well, it’s about 1:30 AM here on the East Coast and I’m about ready to hit the sack. However, I’ve actually made some pretty good progress in the past four hours. Here’s a screen:

The game is a Myst style point-and-click adventure. I’m actually a bit beside myself at the moment because so far everything is working as planned. Obviously, this means by Sunday the game will be a broken mess, but for now I am satisfied 😀

Now, Some music. The Lighthouse made me think of the tarot card “The Tower”, the whole hell thing, made me think of campfires and Danse Macabre:

Poker macabre by Felipe Budinich

previous progress:  Phares, WIP 001

Tags: music, Phares, WIP Day 1

So, my Java coding has advanced massively! I now have my images loaded it’s on to the simple logic that will run my game. Color Scheme is Black and White. I may throw in a red here or there as well.

I took a break and drew this.

Anyway, back to coding.

~Mitch

Live Stream (Shameless Self Promotion): http://www.twitch.tv/bob_george33

First draft and took …way too long. And I don’t even like it :p. There’s no fun

Also, I don’t want to do a platformer, as I did that last time. Still want to make something though, so I can’t just abandon LD

Therefore…I might be going into a completely different direction. Stay tuned

My request: Make a game where you play a kitten that must become adopted.
A few ideas…

• Try thinking backward. Make a game where you must become alone. Kill everybody, escape from the annoying person, ect.
• Dating sim (Don’t).
• The goal is to get two both + magnets “touching” each-other.
• Snowflake looking for somebody like him/her/heirm/it.
• A loan.

Have fun!!!

My goal was to only use Blender and GIMP, but after one hour of brainstorming the idea formed in my head needed the simplicity o Unity.

Here’s my first screenshot (I tried photographing my notebook, but my camera doesn’t focus the letters)

Just woke up, batteries are full, got coffee. Ready to take on the next part : lightnings!

I’m still livestreaming by the way! http://www.twitch.tv/tentaclenoises

Feel free to join in IRC and chat to me! Im going full nocturnal for this one.

Ack, there were only a handful of themes that I didn’t have a concept for. Skimming the other rounds after all the votes had been cast, I didn’t think “Alone” really stood a chance. Have to make a trip to a friends this weekend. Going to be stuck on a train for 12 hours of the jam. I figure it’ll make the time pass a little quicker.

I’m thinking I’ll go with a bit of a Hulk rip off. You’re a man who’s been turned into a grotesque monster during a government experiment. All you want to do is escape the facility and be left alone. I’m still itching for a randomly-generated game, so I figure it’ll be a platformer with randomly generated levels. Some simple combat, and some pixel art.

If I can knock that all out quickly enough, I’d love to implement something like the power-up system in The Binding of Isaac, with random power-ups that cosmetically alter your character. So you’d end up with a different play style and look with each run through. But heck I’ll be content if I get to the point where my randomly generated levels work out I’ll be happy.

Good luck to all the jammers!

Ok, since I had my idea perfectly clear, I went ahead and wrote my design document. For the document, I use a template shared by Mike Birkhead on Gamasutra.

The game brief is this:

ENOLA is a first/third person exploration game. Player will explore the desloate environment, finding clues as to what happened, until reaching the final destination. The game introduces only one (faceless) character, which is in fact the player, and takes place in some sort of limbo from which the player must escape.

The reason why I state first/third person is because I am not sure if I’ll have the chance to code the third person part, as well as create a third person character, although I thought of something that could really help me save a lot of time (hint: Journey)

So, you see it’s a very simple idea. As you read above, the title of the game is ENOLA, which is actually ALONE spelled backwards. It will make sense as you see more of the game

For inspiration, I’m using Limbo:

Now that the document is finished, sleep. Tomorrow, rise and shine Mister Freeman… rise and shine…

I got an idea. An idea I can work with. Plus the easter egg kittens will be there 😀

Well, four hours and a half in, and I got a test level running with most of the basic gameplay elements working.

www.frankiesmileshow.com/LudumDare/LudumDareFrankie.zip

Controls: arrows move, X stops you to block, C attacks, D places a bomb. Attack a lock with C to use your key (if you got one)

The context and theme arn’t in the game at all right now, its all ugly placeholder stuff. The games mood is going to be quite dark, in fact, something you couldn’t really guess from looking at the placeholders.

My plan is to spend the first 24 hours on the gameplay exclusively, and then the next 24 hours on making polished visuals. I will stop adding new features to the game at the 22 hour mark to finish whatever im doing at the time, to spend all of the remaining time on art and sound exclusively, and ill try my best not to waste any time on art assets before that. I need to force myself to do this or Ill waste way too much time on art.

We are off for tonight. But we will be back again tomorrow to start working on a more concise ideas.

Happy deving to all of you.

We have the work divied out and the skeleton of a story set.  It’s a dating sim, ‘cuz that’s the kind of game we all like.

I find it amusing that a couple of posts ago someone urged NOT to do a dating sim.

There is a plot affecting mini game written in pygame.

Susan and the Myzzy Team

Tags: pygame, Ren'Py

My progress so far:

There’s a level with solid tiles and tiles you walk through.  Enemies use basic pathing to find you.  The player has a weapon, which fires bullets.  The sprites onscreen are sorted by depth, so they don’t have that nasty sorting hting where you;re in front of someone and on their face.  But I disgress.

Tomorrow: bullets kill things.  Enemies are spawned.  More weapons.  An artist friend is stopping by to help finish the music my brother made and to do art.

Sunday: I expect the basic game works by then.  More weapons, finishing art, testing.  Probably score stuff, menu and title, maybe more enemy types.

Monday: Testing, testing, testing!  Then testing of the distribution to the only other Windows machine in the house, which went badly last LD.  Sorry I use XNA, all.

Tags: postmortem, xna

This is my first Ludum Dare  so I will try my best.

I will use Actionscript 3 and  for the graphics I will use Paint.net.

So. Learned how to load a level better than hard coding… Every. Single. Tile. And I taught myself.

It’s such a tiny feat, yet I feel like a boss.

So… I happen to start a bit late, but that’s okay. Starting late wasn’t really the problem.

The blank sheet of paper was.

But, after 2 hours, the design is mostly done, although I have nothing to show for it since I forgot I didn’t own a scanner. Threw a bunch of ideas together, made some crappy stick drawings to give me a little idea of where I was going, no ending yet but that’ll come soon.

You are stranded on an island, ALONE! (see what I did there)
You’ll have to find items to survive! Unknown yet if the wildlife will be aggressive or not (or existing, for that matter).
Will have to come up with some sort of item management, maybe? Or only hold one or two items at a time?
Still working out the ending: A- send a signal, make a raft, get picked up by a boat/plane? B- find out that the island houses a military/scientific/secret/evil-lair-type facility? More to come.

Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about this. I am completely out of my comfort zone here.

Game on, LudumDare. Game on.

A group of around 8 students from the young Olin College is challenging the Ludum Dare Jam.  We have a livestream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/olin-ludum-dare

We’re making a platformer based in a large spacecraft.  The hook – our lonely spaceman can make the spaceship move beneath his feet.

Our platform – Python/Pygame+Box2D.  We have some artists working on basic arts and have figured out our basic plan of attack for tomorrow.

We’ll keep the Ludum Dare community posted with posts frequently.  Good luck to everyone out there, and look forward to our game!

-Matt (likely to soon be replaced by people better at writing)

Oh, and here’s some pictures:

Brainstorming

Game Mechanics

Concept Art

Main Character

Tags: Olin

Update my state, story more or less finish, and starting with the art and programming =)

Sup.

Finally got an idea. Basically, it will be Sokoban, except you play a person who is exceptionally ALONE. You push clay blocks (thanks _frog on #tigirc) into a kiln to create a golem so you won’t be lonely anymore. And that’s pretty much it.

P.S. I’ll be working in AS3 (Flixel library), using GraphicsGale for graphics.

Everything is not quite clear but the main idea is here : let’s have an alone character in a cube (if that reminds you a movie.. well, that’s not quite a coincidence, but let’s not copy its story) and he must find the exit..by himself of course

early overview…

I’ve gotten some basic walking scripted out, and did some base animations.

Probably not a good idea to make stuff face in so many directions..

I doubt I will end up with enough time to clean this up let alone make it look pretty with the rest of the ideas I have. But it will do for now.

The juices have bubbled and churned over the course of dinner and dessert, and some notes have been scribbled, crossed out, and scribbled again. If this sounds like your progress so far in Ludum Dare 22, you are not alone!

At the moment I’m thinking of doing a growing up sim / action adventure hybrid, sort of My Pet Protector meets LoZ, but without the caretaker (since you are alone). Some ideas flying on the blogroll seem similar, so I’ll have to find some my own originality somewhere. I have ideas about how to make it fun and exciting, but so far no code has hit the editor. In fact I’m still not 100% sure of my platform, still divided between Flash, HTML5, and Java.

Nevertheless, I feel like I have at least somewhere to start when I wake in the morning. Until then, goodnight Ludumites.

This is my first time doing a Ludum Dare, and really my first time making a videogame. I registered at the last moment (~20 min from the start time) and have been running on nervous enthusiasm since.

The Alone theme caught me off guard, since I’ve had a mostly complete, thematically relevant concept knocking around in my brain for over a year now. This kinda feels like cheating, since I can skip the design phase and get right to coding. I don’t feel too bad, though; I haven’t done any coding or other resource work until now, so I’m following the rules. It just feels weird to finally get this thing into a tangible form.

The original idea called for Unity, but I don’t actually know how to work that software yet, so I fell back on GameMaker. I already have a (n incredibly fake, hacked together) pseudo-3D environment and the first interactive object in place and working as expected. This is way more than I thought I could get done in a couple hours, so I’m very pleased.

Beautiful.

So far I’ve made this. The idea is that your a lonely robot on a space ship all alone.

After some technical issues with capturing, VM crashing, and laptop misbehaving…I eventually got some work done. I’ve mostly been playing around with steering behaviours trying to get the player control to feel right, going for a very fluid looking game this time around.

After accidentally sleeping in and missing the big announcement, here is my work so far, after 5hrs! Super stoked with the theme. I’m using my own html5 game engine (canvas based). You should follow me on twitter! twitter.com/aaronsnoswell.

And so it begins. Normally I use Ruby/Gosu but decided to try something new… Goal for evening #1 (LD started at 9pm for me) was to get a base app created and deployed using Sinatra, JavaScript/CoffeeScript, HTML5/Canvas, SASS, and HAML. Success!

code: http://github.com/adambair/afn
game: http://afn.heroku.com
log: http://afn.heroku.com/log

Time to get some rest. More fun tomorrow!

Tags: afn, alone, canvas, javascript, LD22

Well I’ve started.

I’ve wrote out a basic story for…questy puzzley type manic mansion type deal.

It’s about a guy who gets a text about some leaked celebrity pictures and has to get everyone at his party to leave so he can….look at the pictures in peace.

(There’ll also be an option to have that part be tame and have him just want to go to bed.)

so far I have some basic art and collision detection.

After the initial idea, I came to a concept and story, which I plan to post later once I start developing. Also the game name is “Loot Alone”.

For now, I pixeled all the objects. And man, let me tell you, how I struggled to make these 7 elements… They aren’t that good and still they took me 4 hours of work:

Next: I have 4 characters to draw. I think this will probably take me another 4 or more hours. I REALLY want to get better at doing art. But looks like the more I try, the worst I become.

BTW: In the game concept I included a Kitten.

Tags: easter-egg, kitten-challenge, loot-alone

It’s already 2am here, but I have an idea now. I think I can do the entire game with just JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. No canvas needed.

Although there will be no way for the user to save their progress unless I setup a database or use something like Titanium Studio. For now I’m not going to worry about it. If you leave the game you lose your progress. I need a working game before I need to worry about other things.

Well, I’m ready to get started. Quite happy the theme is not kittens, but I will accept the challenge to put some kittens in my game.

The game i’ll be building will contain:

• zombies
• top-down
• zombies
• day/night cycles
• zombies

Back in business, rolling out a new idea that sorta works as a social critique at the same time.

YOU ARE.

ALONE.

I figured out how to switch my player between being controlled by the physics engine and manual control. When in free-fall you can make him rotate a bit. I also want him to cling to surfaces and the movement would be more like a game like Strider or Gunpoint where you can climb on walls. Once on the wall, you should be able to aim yourself using the mouse and then kick off the wall in the direction you’re facing.

This seemed like a good idea to go for manual control since I read a post about somebody who was frustrated with implementing player control through the physics engine.

No screenshot as it looks the same currently.

You don’t want to know.

No, you really don’t want to know.

My aim is to create a really annoying game. Oh, and it’ll feature insanity. And lots of annoying red and white circles. And it’ll have bad graphics. My game will be called “Swarm,” a.k.a. “I Just Want to Be Alone.”

‘Nuff said, because I do want you folks to play my game for a few seconds…

So Im home finally, starting my game at 5.30pm, so I should be able to get a decent 8 hours in before some sleep.

Im very happy with the theme ‘Alone’, as my favourite game pre-idea for this LD fits in very nicely with it, and I should be able to make a decent haunting sci fi horror game with interesting story (and a twist!)

Also, just as I start, a decent storm rolls in, the thunder is shaking my house, so fingers crossed that the power doesnt go out…..

Either way, its time to get into planning and working on my main character. Im so organised for this LD that I have screen-capturing going on already as I write this, so this whole thing will hopefully result in a decent game + my first ever LD timelapse

Ill post next when I have something worth posting.

Tags: AD-Edge, LD22

ok, so the theme has been out for a while, and we have a new voting category. Awesome, I was kinda hoping for Randomly Generated, but alone should be fun, time to get cracking!

I’ve decided that I’d kick this Ludum Dare off by 2 hours of sober coding, followed by as much time as possible at Ballmer’s peak. So far, I’m a shot of 151 in, and a beer. Kegerator is running at full potential, wish me luck!

For more info on Ballmer’s Peak, – http://xkcd.com/323/

I’ve been drawing in Blender and pasted some renders together in the gimp.  This is what the game should look like when it’s finished (minus the enemies, just the player and environment).

I was able to get something looking fairly well, I feel, without much effort or time.  However it does not have any gameplay yet besides a player that can move in 8 directions.  Tomorrow morning I need to jump directly on the gameplay portion.

I started my game, basically, you’re a truck driver.  So far I have some basic truck physics using farseer and a bezier curve sprite road drawing system:

Hi, this is my first participation in LD. I had some game programming experience in the past, but making a game in 48h is certainly a challenge. In the first 6 hours i prepared most of the graphics:

And the music, well it’s a bit boring, just a rhythm guitar, i tried playing some solos, but i suck at that, and amplitube decided to crash while recording some, so this is all for now. I’ll try to make something more if i have some time left.

Rhythm Guitar
That’s it for now, i’ll sleep a few hours now.

No screenshots to share at this time; unfortunately, I spend the better half of this evening working out the collisions for player movement before doing anything else.

I have to use ray-tracing to physically simulate the collision, but there is some mathematical error in the way jMonkeyEngine calculates distance from the ray shot, which prevents certain directions from preventing motion correctly… you just get stuck to the wall. I’m not convinced this is a jME problem though. I think I have an idea of how to fix it, but I’m going to bed before I lose my sanity any more.

Tags: jmonkeyengine, ray-tracing, Vectors

Ludum dare status: idea evolving. Not much progress yet. Aiming to have a simple level working by the end of tonight…. Will iterate from there.

I have absolutely nothing to show so far, and I am entirely content with how things are going.

Am I insane?

I like to think so.

Alone.

So… back to sleep. I’ll get an idea and start coding in avt 1 or 2 hours.

Tags: LD #22

The game is starting to come along. Meteorites fly towards the player now at randomly generated intervals. The distance counter is indicating how far away the comet is that you have to shoot down. Anyway, here’s a couple progress videos I’ve shot thus far tonight.

Dino Pilot – Part 1

Dino Pilot – Part 2

Waking up just an hour ago, i was a little disappointed in the theme.. “Alone” – oh well, i guess the idea is to get you out of your habits, right?

After brainstorming for a while I have decided on an exploration/puzzle solution for the theme. In the style of puzzle games, like Myst, but a bit (read: a lot) more straight forward. Thinking what I could do differently that the Myst series, i remembered that you cannot carry items for usage (at best you can have a picture of the item), so there it is:

You’re on a lone island trying to solve “puzzles” that involves a lot of object scattered around the place. Of course, you can only carry a few at a time.

>>> Video progress 1 <<<

After we decided what to do, I did the thing in the right while my friend was on the bed (designing and dreaming at the same time), then we switched places and he did the thing on the left and the androids.

So.

I have created an interface in java for a point and click adventure.
I wrote tons of extra code for other stuff like a character label and timers but I’m not sure if I should or how I add any of it to my current idea.
I made sound effects a reality but have’nt recorded and audio data.

Here are some screenshots of the mess so far:

I want to add some color mechanics if you can’t tell.

Jpeg screenshots suck btw.
That little dot guy is some of the extra timer character movement collision extra bs if I do this all point and click.

Jjjjjjaaavvvaaaaa…. I’m getting the rust off the gears now.

Tags: Flyinpancake

I’ve got kinda a basic idea of what I am doing and I’ve gotten a lot of basic stuff working. I hoping for it to be a story driven platformer (really creative, right?). I’m kinda trying to take advantage of a reduced color palette to create a mood and reinforce the loneliness of the player. I don’t really know how successful I will be, but working with white+gray+black palette is kinda fun. Also, the physics are currently terrible. I always have a hard time getting platformer physics just right. It seems it either feels a little too floaty or feels a little too heavy. Hopefully I can manage to find a happy medium.

Here is a screenshot, because that’s all most people care about.

Tags: LD22, ld48

http://www.livestream.com/smalldeadguy

I will be using gimp, eclipse and some other tools for various things. Watch my stream! 😛

Concept Sketch for my game about mountaineering, manly adventure, and dying alone.  I’m gearing up for a weekend of coding, whiskey, and Hemingway quotes.

So, the theme is “Alone”.

My first though was to make an exploration game, with the goal of finding out what happened to turn the location into a frozen wasteland. And if I feel like I can do it, I’ll add in some QTE-s for dodging. Perhaps even multiple endings.

Coding starts in ~30 minutes, grabbing breakfast first.

Here we go again, greetings LD22! My LD21 game would’ve fitted this theme perfectly too so I was hoping for something a bit different. But I think I got an idea now. I’m probably taking it pretty easy this time and just doing a short game.

Anyway, be creative everyone and have fun!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep my eyes open last night to wait for the theme announcement, so I went to bed.

I’ve just woken up, it’s 7 am, with just over 1 Day and  18 hours left and a theme of Alone.

I had no ideas for this one, so I’m going to have to think for bit. Lets see what I can do.

Yup, the rest of you make me look bad

Theme is not inspiring but I wanted to do fluid simulator and that I gonna do. Game name should be “alone with fluid simulator” but i dont give up yet maybe there is idea somewhere hiding under technical stuff.

Idea for fluid simulator is use box2d circles and render them as metaballs with alpha test shader. I hope that is gonna work or I am in trouble.

http://pastebin.com/7HAkjrfw

Hardcoded alpha test shader that I use.

http://pastebin.com/wzhierEa

Fixed timestep stepper. That I gonna use.

My game is coming along GREAT! A lot has been done in 4.5 hours. What I know so far is that It’s a side scrolling, 2D shooter.

• Player Controls & Shooting
• Map states
• Tile/Bullet/Monster Systems
• Tile Graphics
• Player Graphics/Animation

Things to Add:

• Interactable Items
• Mob Graphics
• Mob Spawner
• Scrolling text

Yay! So, we got some awesome progress going here! (Depending on how well we are doing, we may not sleep D: )

Anyways, not that you guys care but, here is a snapshot of your competition 😀

Hi, it’s my first LD, very funy experience

(sorry , I’m french and i don’t speak english very well ;))

I create a plateforme game in a jungle with a hero like Idiana Jones in Java with AWT.

First screenshot :

in the meantime, have a kitten:

but I’ve gotten progress made.

I’ve decided that my game will focus on vengeance. The ghosty guy you see, that guy was forever alone in his life, shunned by society, and now he’s out for blood.

Things are goin’ pretty well for the two of us right now.

We took the first hour or so to blast out some ideas and finally decide on one.

We’re both Chronolapsing and I’m also livestreaming one of my monitors. It’s pretty fun so far. We’ve got a lot of the game planned out already. I’ve just got to design everything while he… codes. Duh, right? Well, just wanted to say that we’re still goin’ strong and that we’ve only procrastinated once! …okay, twice. But we’re still workin! Yataa!

This is what we look like! And…

..here is my screen. ORIGINAL CONTENT, DO NOT STEAL.

lol.

GL errbody.

I can’t believe it’s been that long…

So I’ve got a world… I’ve got lighting… I’ve got a camera… Sound library… But no idea…

I even have multiplayer support! But the theme “Alone” doesn’t really suit that… I assume this is what they call “writers block”.

… After thinking for a while: I’m scrapping everything and starting again. Going back to 2D because I cannot for the life of me think how to make anything in 3D.

I even have a whiteboard with a kitty on top to help me with my idea ^_^

Spent a couple hours today coming up with a concept and some basic gameplay. Take a look at some of what I’ve done 😀

About five hours into the jam, we, a team of three, fuelled on food and drinks are entering our first Ludum Dare.
With the theme of “Alone” confused us at first on how we were goign to tackle it. Then we decided to create a mining game where you dig to collect resourcesunder the ground to fuel your escape vehicle to leave the area you are (probably in space).
So far we have managed to create a dodgy title screen, with awesome title music (all made on guitar, going to add clarinet) and a random level generation, which will be updated heavily later.
We are coding it in XNA, music recording with Audacity and the graphics are made in Paint.NET.

Here is our level so far. (Two random generations)

A livestream of us working (currently only two computers) can be found at http://www.spujika.info/ld

Well due to some restrictions I to not do a moon exploration game but still keep my sci-fi idea going

So if you have heard of the new planet keppler NASA have found, this Apollo Keppler gone wrong!

Tell me what you think!

So after getting back from my Christmas Party pretty much fell asleep in my bed, my boyfriend was kind enough to stay up and find out the theme for me. However I just could not be bothered to get up, so almost 6 hours in eek! I’ve decided to get up and do this. No real thoughts on the theme yet. I’ll do a bit of brain storming though.

Gonna do a live feed maybe, I usually LD with my sister, but she’s moved away so we were gonna live stream together, currently I look terrible and since I’m brainstorming I don’t see much merit in a stream of me sat looking at Wikipedia looking like the walking dead.

Oh, as usual I’m using Game Maker, only just realised that I no longer have photoshop with Catmoo gone so my game make look even worse than usual :/

yeah, I got some of that I think

got the guy running around in unity, and set the lighting up more or less how I want it, have been streaming over at twitch.tv/sophiehoulden, if anyone is interested. though I’m about to head down to the CB2 meetup, dunno what the internet there is like so the stream may die until this evening.

Alone is a very interesting theme>

I spent an hour and a  half figuring this out, along with then a very quick research into the assets required.

For now, my game’s name is ‘Alone Nowhere’

The progress so far has been just been in conceptualizing. However I’m off to a slightly bad start since I didn’t sleep during the night, so ended up sleeping 4 hours of my time away.

• Concept creation and along with the plot –  1.5 hours complete in allocated time,
• List of stuff to Model, References research: done before 0.5 hours, 10 minutes spent.
• Slept 4 hours.

Anyway, no screenshots yet, will update on the next 10th step, for now, I’ve been planning,

Next: Coding

Now I am starting the actual coding part. But heres a list of stuff I have to create  as assets

• A Smart phone – Just build something that mocks the nowdays smart phones: No signal ( ofcourse)
• A Screwdriver (Rusty)
• A Nearly used candle Stick
• A Lighter
• A Token
• Fuse Box
• Fuse
• Blown Fuse
• A Truck of ******
• A Car and its interior
• Vandalized Phonebox
• Road
• Fense
• Gas station shack
• Street lamp
• pair of eyes in a distance

I figured out how to put the physics objects into groups and how to define a handler for collision events. I am now detecting when the player object collides with an object in the “wall” group, and telling the player object to switch to manual control then.

I’m getting tired, I think I will call it quits for tonight. I’m in good spirits as I feel like I made decent progress tonight. See you all tomorrow morning!

Two hours in,  and I have animated movements in 8 directions, basic collision with tiles in the background, and a moving camera that follows the player until you hit the edge of a map.

Working on making objects I can interact with next.

Wild speculation as to what I’m making:

Don’t worry, the Foreveralone is just placeholder art.

right, 2 hours in and i have a basic engine with collision on the way.I’m building a basic age of empires inspired thing.Its top down and you need to survive in the “wilderness” ALONE! Basically You chop down trees and build shelters to survive the night. I think that’s the way it’s heading. I would post a screenshot but there’s not much to see yet just a bunch of ugly colored squares.

Good luck to everyone else!!

I have been working on the game for a little while now i have a map editor working and collision working  im not happy with the speed the game is progressing time to kick it into overdrive.

So, the game can currently load and render a 16×12 level.

It’s harder to do than it looks.

I would like to get larger levels working, but for now physics are a bigger priority. The data is there, it just needs to be used. I think I’ll need to add in some slope dirt tiles though, which is one place where the tile flipping capabilities of the VDP may come in handy.

Although to get THAT working, I need to be able to move the player around. I think I’ll need to pull out something like that OO framework I used in LD19.

In other news, I’ve shifted the player graphics handling stuff to a VBlank interrupt handler.

Oh yeah, I’ve had some music playing for quite some time now. It starts with the equivalent of 6 channels worth of echo (then drops to 4 due to the bass). Have a listen.

I think I’m moving more quickly than I ever have before!  I have a lovely screenshot!

The thing is… I don’t actually know what my game is about yet.  That’s also not a real title… probably.  Need something catchier.  The real thing I’m trying to show here is that I not only have graphics up, but I have those little dudes!  Who move around by themselves, and deal with colliding with one-another!  It’s pretty sweet…

Tags: alone, game, kitten, pygame, python

I spent most of the night messing with art and coming up with ideas. I think I have something going, but I’m going to sleep on it.

Here’s what I’ve got so far

I was going to do a more adventure type game.

Now, feces to that. It’s time for a TOWER DEFENSE GAME. TOTALLY ORIGINAL.

Now here’s what our main character was going to look like. I know, it’s utter crap, but it still took me like an hour.

I’m so good.

Tags: epic, epicfail, fail, kitteh, tower defense

So, the theme ‘Alone’ was a right kick in the proverbials.. I didn’t think anyone would vote for such a bland theme that’s clearly angled towards artists rather than programmers, but oh well.

I’m thinking of just making a tower defence game or something, seeing as I haven’t done one before, but I may not submit it, we’ll see how things go.

I started with probably the worst thing.

Art.

My character was generated using charas (http://www.charas-project.net/) and doesn’t look half bad. Unfortunately, the environment is very much bleh!

Yeah, that’s supposed to be a beach.  Have yet to put the trees in. Thoroughly unimpressed with my artistic work so far.

Gonna go pass out for a bit, maybe my muse will wake up with me tomorrow morning?

I’ve spent the past few hours watching the sun rise (I’m in Belgium) over a snowy railway line, drinking coffee and contemplating what it means to be alone.

I’ve got a game concept, and yeah – it’s a platformer, I get the feeling those are popular – hopefully I’ll be able to enact something to make it feel good by the end of the day.

Where I am? Well you can see for yourself, I’m continually deploying to my Heroku instance here:

http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/ (Warning, spins the CPU a bit as I’m not mitigating that yet)

So that’s level loading, level creation, basic player physics and controls sorted out. Not bad really, I’m pleased with that progress. Now I’m going to step back and do the following:

• make sure I can write a script to tell the story I want to tell,
• sort out a splash screen, loading, and basic application life-cycle
• write the story from beginning to end
• Make sure the game has a logical beginning, middle and end
• Tweak tweak tweak, polish, real  graphics and real sounds

I decided at the last minute that I wanted to try my hand at straight LWJGL and 3D (which I have never done before).  This was probably a mistake.  Normally I have Slick2D to help with the heavy lifting.

So after three hours of fiddling with OpenGL settings, I finally have TTF text on the screen as well as a first person camera.  Woo!

Results:

The font (Fifteen Okay) is a freeware font I found online.   I hope we aren’t expected to make our own fonts from scratch.

As I said in my previous post, I struggled to come up with an original idea around the “alone” theme. I thought and mulled over it and brainstormed a few things. Then got to prototyping some movement and controls, and voila: my first screenshot for LD22:

It’s going to be a top down point-and-click “adventure” with fixed cameras. I’ve never made a point-and-click adventure before, hell I can’t even think of the last one that I played. The theme is really evocative of stories and that’s hard to really hammer out in 48 hours. I’m not expecting it to be too terribly long, but I’m hoping I can get core gameplay down fast so I can produce what little art my inferior skills can produce.

Decided on “GodMaker” for a game. Have a game grid, turn-based WASD movement for player, and AI with a “follow first visible opponent” running. AI not really doing much though. Going to call it a night and debug in the morning.

LD48 #22: GodMaker

Here I am, well rested and ready to rumble.

The theme is alone – I suppose that’s the closest we could get to “it’s dangrous to go alone, take this” 😛 Much better theme though, I only had lunch and I already have multiple ideas:

• You’re a coder who wants to be left alone so he can code for Ludum Dare but people keep bugging him
• Something involving a dating service
• You’re all alone and hate it, so you clone yourself
• Some kind of evil god game where you try to separate the people

Those are settings, no game ideas, but so far I like the theme. I’ll still spend some more time figuring out what I’ll actually do.

–edit–

More ideas!

• You’re some kind of monster who really just wants to have a friend, but everybody’s scared of you and runs away. When you try to talk, you scream unintelligibly instead. It’d be some kind of point & click adventure and your goal is to find a friend – maybe by destroying the city and building a heart out of the rubble?
• You’re an RPG hero who’s just “beat the game” – you found the best sword, beat the boss with two hits and saved the world. Now what should you do? Any monster you encounter flees when it sees you. You’re all alone. (But seriously: what should you do? This sounds like an interesting problem, but how should it be resolved? Let’s ask the IRC!)

I’ve never actually done one of these before, and I’m late, and it’ll probably be not very good if I even finish it. Gotta try anyway. Gonna be using Stencyl cause I’m not great at programming. We’ll see how this goes.

The swarming and avoidance behaviours are working correctly, and it’s all pretty easily tweakable too. The basic mechanic is there, all I need to implement is the goal and I have a fully functional game to mess with! No fancy graphics or anything until everything is working

Basic hero dude with walk animation done, along with concepts for antagonists and npc’s and most of my level design and game mechanics white-boarded.  Taking a little break and then on to coding!  Haven’t come up with a title yet, but the idea is the more you’re alone in your thoughts the closer you become to going insane (kinda like doing an LD).

Tags: LD #22

Concept

So I’ve begun my entry. It’s called Zolcan. You are an astronomer traveling to a distant planet. Your buddies disappears and you are stranded, alone, on this alien jungle planet. Classic shmup story and game play.

Tags: flash, Flixel