This is my first attempt into Ludum Dare, so don’t expect too much.
My project will be created in C# XNA Game Studio.
I’m really more of a design as you go, kinda game developer, so dont know what the game will become, even though I’v already made an intro and set the mood with music and a background.

EDIT: Now after a lot of time, I don’t see this project being finished. I’ve however learned a lot, and gotten back into programming games, which I lost the motivation for. Also I’ve learned some new skills, like making music from scratch (though I wouldn’t call myself a musician just yet).

The idea of ‘Alone’ just didn’t inspire me enough, even though I had a semi-great idea for a story, the gameplay didn’t match.

Well, I tried going bed at 2:00 AM and see LD22 theme at 8 or 10 AM (theme was published at 3:00 AM). I rolled in bed for about one and a half hour until realizing I was too nervous about my first LD to sleep, so I tried to talk with my GF and listen to random music, without avail. Now I’m awake, playing some DotA2 and avoiding thinking about LD until that 8:00AM. IDK if I’ll be able to do it.

But at least I’m not alone 😛

is sort of what happens when you make a multiplayer game, put it on the internet, and can see other people’s tiny avatars moving around, and know that the netcode is working.

This is the link for the game at the moment and it’s unlikely to change in the future, so any and all updates over the weekend will be posted there. In the meanwhile, there are tiny faces moving around!

Well, I almost gave up about 1 hour ago. I Already knew that my artistic skills where sh*t and after trying to draw about 5 different things that looked horrible and didn’t suite the Idea I had I stopped right there.

Anyway, I have decided to change the theme and gameplay to be alot different then it was earlier, Mostly due to the fact that I need to limit my artistic skills to something more basic, This however doesnt mean that it will be boring..

The games tentative title is “You are NOT alone”…

Anyone else got Paul Oakenfold pumping in the background…

The theme ‘alone’ wont describe my first experience with Ludum Dare, but I’m excited about participating just as well!

Our team’s game is going to be titled Surume: The Little Squid, and I’m excited to say we’re collaborating across time-zones (A couple of us are the in Northern California, a programmer is somewhere in the States, and musician at Berklee).

We’ve all got a game set up in our heads, but are going to type out and condense the design and assign individual tasks within the next hour. The game’s going to be built in Flash with the Flashpunk game engine.

Alright, off to starting on those pixel animations!

After struggling to come up with an idea I liked, I finally found one. I kept getting stuck on the idea of a plat-former like Prior from Ludum Dare 19, but I finally settled on a sci-fi game set it space.

The goal will be to make money, upgrade your ship, and set the highest score.

Tonight I just got basic movement up, asteroids generating, and a little bit of work on the space station interactions (for upgrading your ship):

I’m starting to get something interesting so I put in online : http://ld22.musume.fr/

I’m not sure on which browser It works but I do all my test on Chrome.

For now (at the time of this post), tile system is working,  collissions are working too and finally player movement (it is registered only when you have focus on the input field below the map).

I am going to make a puzzle game where you are supposed to isolate the bullies from other kids by building fences!
When the bullies are all alone they will finally understand the consequences of their actions and ask for forgiveness

I think that I will add other actions beside building fences, like adding toys to attract kids etc. but I am not completely sure about all the mechanics yet.

Here is a screenshot from the level editor Tiled:

Good luck to you all!

A pencil pot. This is actually an out of date render, but this will be a prop on the map. It’s fairly large (about 6-ish times taller than the plane) so it will be used for blocking stuff off I suppose

Let me tell you a secret about it…I gave up and decided to do something else

Dawn and I have a great plan ahead for our game offering for this competition.  It’s very “2012” so stay tuned!

We’ll also be employing an absolutely twisted mechanic Ari thought of during dinner that is going to make people really sweat.

This will not be your average tower defense game, for sure! :DDD

First time using Tiled and it took way too long to get loaded and into a basic JFrame. I had to do crazy things to get it to find resources from the class loader. Ugh!!!

Anyways I also made those crappy tiles for the basic map that I will probably never get around to polishing. Next is working out all the game logic, story characters etc. I am gonna try keeping that completely separate from the engine code and have the engine just hook into the game logic. Based on a gamasutra article Separation Of Gameplay

Thought the idea was a nice way to make code that you can easily integrate with another engine and that will also make it easier to port to other languages, platforms as well. But I am doing it just to be able to not have to worry about the graphics code which I’ve done hundreds of times already.

Time sure does move fast, doesn’t it?

I really have nothing to show other than ideas. Which I am not showing just yet. Why?

As both an answer to that question and a bit of insight as to what’s on my mind right now: I’m not sure if what I am doing is so much a game as it is an experience.

But that said… I don’t want to ruin the experience. Not yet.

I also apparently don’t want to code it either, given my progress.

Ok so scrapping my last idea before I go any further, it’s garbage.

I also had to stop livestreaming because my computer just can’t handle it (it’s not a very good one, unfortunately).

I’m back at square one, and back to thinking about interesting ideas, hopefully I’ll come up with something smaller and more ‘alone’ than what I was going for originally.

Hey everyone! I am part of a small indie team that is using the Game Jam as an exercise to springboard development and generate new and exciting ideas!  It will also help us road-test our team to determine whether it is one that we will be comfortable moving forward with onto a long-term project. We’ve been brainstorming all night with our related film group from AnotherLetdown.com (our site is apparently down again… we really need to get a more reliable provider), and I believe we have a unique idea about where we are going with the theme that you’ll all enjoy. I won’t spoil it for you until we have screencaps, but I will give out the following details:

It will be 2D

We will probably use the XNA libraries to create it

Our final entry will be built for the PC.

Development Tools will include:

Visual C# (Code)

Photoshop (Visuals)

Pro Tools (Audio)

Google Docs (Documentation)

Skype (Remote Communication)

Tourtise SVN (Repository GUI)

Visual SVN (Repository Management)

Hamachi (Remote network connections, it’s a hack but it’s)

Development will probably be split between our group work session tomorrow and individual work sessions throughout the competition (during which we will communicate remotely). At our group work session tomorrow I will be using an old Lenovo T61, but once I get back I will likely switch to my custom desktop rig, which I built from parts last year as a designated dev machine. The horsepower will be wasted on a 2D game, but I like to believe my development time will not.

Our win condition is leaving the Jam with the beginnings of a concept that could potentially be used to bootstrap our development efforts for our long term projects. A huge plus will be if we discover that we have assembled a reliable team that is capable of working well together on other projects. Of course, the biggest win will be if we can create something that YOU all enjoy playing. So stay tuned and GOOD LUCK! I hope we all have a really fun time at LD 22!

I’m done for tonight, but thought I’d post my game’s current state, since it seems everybody else is.

I was hoping to get a little more done, but this is good enough. Game still doesn’t have an official name yet though.

OMFG, THERE ARE WALLS!

Soo. Yeah. I’ll just record an update for the documentary, then I’ll go sleep for 3 hours or something. I’m just incredibly tired right now.

More sketching, more ideas. Getting something more solid.

Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep.  Right now I have most of the artwork sketched out.  I’ll get as much of that in digital form first thing in the morning.  Right now I plan to have 3 levels.  Each level is a different feeling/mood and they progress from dark/dispare/depressing to anger/hatred to fun/uplifting.  In order to pull this off I need all three components (sound, graphics, gameplay) to all work together to create the same feelings within the player.  This is going to be difficult as I’m not a good designer, artist, or musician.  Its a big gamble and I’m sure I’ll fall short of the idea in my head but it would be awesome if it actually works out.

The plot of the game is basically your character gets dumped and he is consumed in his loneliness and dispare and he must work his way through three levels to learn and become comfortable in his new life.  And then I’ll probably have him get together with a cute redhead at the end for the fun of it to show that being alone is a temporary thing that you can learn to enjoy.

The first thing I think of when I see the word “alone” is fear, darkness, loneliness, or survival.

Immediately, I wanted to create a horror game with creepy music and sounds that would drive up the wall.  However, I feel as if that is too obvious of a method to include the theme into the game.

Then, I thought of another idea: What if the object of the game was to achieve the theme?

Surely there must be some scenario I could follow.