It’s been a while, but excuses to make games don’t get much better than this.

In fact, just to make sure I can’t worm my way out, I’m running a real world gathering. No escape! (Any of you in the Coventry area, be sure to hit up Warwick Game Design!)

Programming: Actionscript, extended with Flashpunk, all done in FlashDevelop. Flash will never die!

Sound: FL Studio will be my partner in composition, with maybe a bit of BFXR.

Art: A quick trip through Ludum Dare’s wonderful Tools page introduced me to Graphics Gale. Been working on a far simplified pixel art character style, so I don’t spend half the competition doing animations like last time.

Behold! Yes! A puppy!

Nourishment: I’ve booked myself in for supervising the meetup 1:00AM-1:00PM on both Saturday and Sunday, so copious amounts of pizza, pasta, sandwiches, and jelly should be packed.

Have I mentioned how simply incredible jelly is (Jell-o, for you people across the pond)? Cheap to buy, simple to make, easy to forget, easier to enjoy, and I have gotten over countless blocks by simply wobbling the jelly until I figure out how to solve a problem.

Simply mix one part flavoring, one part gelatin, five parts pure uncut therapy.

This should about cover it for me. Keep up the “I’m in” posts, everyone, and have a great competition!

Dearest of couples, ready to do coupl-y stuff, for the sake of a game!

These two characters will be the two characters in my game. As of now, the plan is to make it so you control our lovely redhaired friend, and provide guidance to our fabulously dressed purple friend.

They’re holding hands!

Mechanically speaking, the game is almost complete. My shedule leaves me the rest of today to finish level design. Should hopefully be doable…

At last, I have recovered from yesterday’s long night, as well as the sheer volume of stress that comes from trying to take on such a genuinely serious topic as my game did.

More on that in the postmortem, whenever I write that. Probably when I have some good feedback to work with.

In the meantime, I finally figured out how to make game gifs!

…I say that, it’s not doing much of the whole “animated” half of “animated gif”.

That, and I just uploaded the OST onto Soundcloud. Have a listen! Let me know what you think!

You can find Esc over here, if you want to give me some feedback.

Happy jamming, everyone!

Tags: gif, music, soundtrack

I’m livestreaming now!

Need a reason to watch me? Fair enough…

My previous game netted me overall 6th place! In spite of having a button mashing minigame!

Here’s the same .gif I’ve posted earlier tonight because I’m shameless in trying to get people to watch my stream:

To start off the livestream, I’ll be discussing the theme, and how I plan to implement it. I may go over some concept, and better plan out the rest of the jam.

I’ll try and fire off a quick prototype, and go to bed. Eurobros gotta sleep.

Last time on stream: We made the main character art, and panicked over how to make them carry so many weapons.

Big shoutouts to the chat for being so helpful. You guys rule.

This time on stream, we get the weapons looking nicer, we get enemies to behave, then we add in the vacuum cleaner that will give you your weapons!

Join the stream here at www.twitch.tv/mkarp/

Making good progress on my game “Purging Cuddle Kingdoms”!

The premise is that the Cuddle Kingdoms, a peaceful nation who produce no weapons, are being invaded.

You control Princess Eliza Anne-Marie the Unlimb-ited, and use your mighty magnet to steal the invading forces’ weapons, before grasping them in your infinite hands, and unleashing hell.

So what’s going on in this picture? For one, I put way too many enemies in my test level…

The fair Princess uses her mighty magnet to steal weapons from a hoard of foes. The enemies who have their weapons stolen run away, defenceless.

At any stage, you can put away the magnets and use the weapons you stole. All at the same time. There are probably only 15 weapons being held in the gif above, but the sky’s the limit!

You face two enemies at the moment. Ghosts which move towards you slowly, firing single shots, and imps, which teleport when you’re about the steal their weapons and fire multishots.

Do feel free to drop into my livestream at any time, to give me questions, suggestions, a piece of your mind, or some well crafted insults.

I’m about to start writing music! If you need an extra incentive to come and watch that, here’s what I wrote last Ludum Dare:

Hope to see you there!

Last night, I and the poor souls who popped into my stream discovered together that OBS doesn’t play well with FL Studio’s AISO driver. The bottom line is, there were a lot of crashes.

So I wrote the music off stream! You can listen to the banging guitar and synth mix here:

Gonna get back to streaming the game dev soon, join the fun at http://www.twitch.tv/mkarp!

The Cuddle Kingdoms hired a gardener last stream…

They still need a shadow or something, but they do look cute.