Hello everyone and welcome to my Dev Log for Mini LD #37. This is the first time I’ve tried to participate in a Ludum Dare of any kind, so wish me luck! Here’s my plan: I’m gonna make a game that is both a “Not Game” and which uses Real Time. I’m gonna shoot for both themes at once! The game is called Bus Stop. Guess what you have to do? That’s right, you wait for the bus.

The game will begin by picking a random time for the next bus to show up, and display “Est. time till next bus: XX minutes!” Then you leave the game running until that time. If you click the button when the bus is there, you get the “You got on the bus!” screen. But, if you don’t pay attention to the game, then you might miss the bus and get the dreaded “You missed the bus!” screen.

Thus far I’ve got the game to import and display the time of day, and I have timers working, and I’m setting up the game engine. Then I just need some photos for graphics. I think I’ll take them myself. Or, I’ll take a photo of a bus stop and make the characters and vehicles cartoons, or pixel art. Shouldn’t be too hard.

PLANNED FEATURES:

-Exciting real-time action!

-Amazing photo-realistic background!

-Random bored character animations!

-Traffic!

-Leave it running in the background while you check your Facebook!

EDIT: OMG I said game instead of not-game.

Things are going swimmingly for my little “real-time not-game”. The animations were the hardest thing to code because most of the code is just timers. You can actually get on the bus now, so tomorrow I can just polish things and add some fun stuff.

When you start it will give you the estimated time until the next bus. If you are there to click the button you can board it, otherwise the program tells you that you missed it. It will have random traffic go by. The following are mostly things I will add if I have time.

TO-DO:

-Add a Real Time day-night cycle

-Add random pedestrians and/or people who wait for the bus with you

-Add more random vehicles

-Add more sounds

-Character animations

-Mute button (your guy puts in headphones and won’t hear anything, including the bus)

Also I have pics!

I plan to have all graphics attributed to myself. I took the photo, I drew the cartoons and I traced a photo of a bus.

That bus stop is like 3 blocks from my house.

I think I’ll be getting in on this upcoming Ludum Dare, it really is PERFECT timing. I get done with my finals for college on the 13th of December. Of course, I’ll have to do something fun that afternoon to celebrate before shutting myself in for 48 hours. 😛

I’m wondering what code I can put together now that might be useful to have when it begins.

Chances are this time around I will be using:

Processing (Language/IDE/Compiler/Amazingness)

GIMP (for Graphics)

Milky Tracker (for Music)

Well everyone it looks like I’m out. Me and a friend were working on a platforming game and I had this great story planned out, but we took far too long putting together the engine. Turns out there was a lot I overlooked, and today I had to take care of some things and didn’t have enough time… Point is, we don’t have a submission for the Jam but we’re gonna keep working on the game. On the positive side I’ll be able to use whatever code we put together for future LD events.

The story I refer to was kicking around in my head for a while before the Jam and the theme happens to fit perfectly. Also, my friend says he wants to try and rewrite the platformer engine yet again to use Box2D so that will be interesting.

Also, Processing is one of the best software tools I’ve ever used. I definitely recommend it for things like this.

Also here’s some artwork from the game:

Introducing: Sandwich Joe Saga – Escape from Candy World!

Genre- Platformer/Puzzle

Joe, the owner of the local deli, finds a golden ticket in a candy bar, saying he has won a free vacation in Candy World. Before he knows what’s happened, he’s teleported to a whimsical world made entirely of sweets! Not surprisingly he longs for real food and attempts to make his escape.

This was made in about 2 weeks in Processing and me and my friend Gan spent all last afternoon porting it to Google Dart so it would run better in a browser. It was worth it, too. The framerate is so much smoother. But I still haven’t got it to upload properly on itch.io… Try it out, but be warned, the last few levels get hard.

http://gamemakersgarage.com/SandwichJoeSaga/sandwitchjoesaga.html

I’m participating in a local game jam here in Albuquerque, and we’re nearing the 24-hour point. It’s been really cool so far, I’m on the art team this time, and we have 2 programmers putting stuff together in Unity… And then today we got kind of scattered, but I’m confident we’ll be able to meet up in time to finish the game. Since it’s running at the same time as Ludum Dare, the game may be submitted to the Jam but we’re not sure yet. The robots can be killed but they still need a nice explosion animation. #RioGrandeIGDAJam2014 Remember, when you say you’re meeting at someone’s house, don’t show up to meet somewhere else. >:U

(DISCLAIMER: I took the post seriously and I am writing this before making my game, so it’s a joke post, I will post actual news on my game later)

When I saw the theme I wanted to create something clever and original for this mini-dare, and my original plan was spawned from thinking about “What would it look like to watch a game of Super Mario Bros played back in reverse??”. The resulting game is… Well, it’s interesting, you can check it out for yourself. I only with I had been given more time to complete it, what with school and all that. Maybe I’ll continue working on it beyond this! (Probably not though).

– Connorses

I got up late today and I don’t even know what I’m gonna make! Oh god what do I do?? •~•

Looks like I’m making a PICO-8 game after all. Flying dragons are cool! So is gold. Gold is shiny and in this case bright yellow.

But seriously, I have a pretty good idea where I’m going with this.

I have added a new enemy type: an armored theif, AKA “canned food”. :d

I think my game is basically finished, but I’m gonna wait a bit before posting it because I might think of something to change, and there’s still time to make my friends test it for me if I can contact them in the next couple of hours. So yeah this will be the first time I’ve finished in time to submit to the actual LD Compo! \o/

Stay tuned for dragons and gold and stuff.

I mean I’ll probably add more to it for the Jam but for now it is DONE. I’m really happy with how this one went, I picked an idea and stuck with it the whole time. I’ll write a post mortem on what I did with the game later. Right now it’s time for me to relax for a bit, and then inevitably think of that one little detail I just have to change at the last minute! YAY!

When do we actually get to vote and how do we do it?

This weekend I didn’t have much time for jammin’, but I did throw together a proof-of-concept of sorts for the idea I had. It fits both themes!

I’ve made a snowball that rolls around, which you steer with the left/right arrows, and picks up snow and gets bigger… Now how do I make this into a game??

…I might have to submit it to the Jam, but still, I’d like to add more to it… somehow.