Well, theme’s up, and it’s actually quite an interesting one. I’ve got an essay to write before I start, but I figured I may as well post something acknowledging the theme and spamming out some ideas. I’ll develop them initially with a walk around town and the nearby hills, and then in photoshop probably. I probably won’t do very much content generation, sticking with lofi sprites and the like. most of my ideas should stand up well enough without much content anyway.

• Islands, space edition.
  1. basically, a large scale arena shooter on gravity “islands”, which would function as small planetoids.
  2. 3 weapons, RPS style (rifleman beats sharpshooter beats pointman beats rifleman, based on damage buffs/nerfs)
  3. basic AI
  4. 2 teams
  5. fast paced, probably 30 or so actors per team, switchable between them.
• Islands, catastrophe edition
  1. platformer
  2. apocalypse setting, the sky is falling etc (waves of meteors or solar flares or whatever
  3. running from island to island, which is just cover and safety from the radiation
  4. enemies in the islands, which are very hard to kill
  5. maybe destructible terrain lets you expose the creeps to the radiation or meteors or whatever, to kill them and let you stay in the island for longer, waiting out the storm.
  6. either survival (procedural landscape) or safehouse (discrete levels, possibly still PG) level format.
  7. maybe the radiation/meteors erodes the islands? who knows
• Islands, literal edition
  1. top down survival rpg.
  2. maybe there is something coming in from the sea, like evil sea slug people or something.
  3. chance of escape -> win? maybe. i kind of like playing games knowing there’s a futility behind it. if there is no win condition, i’ll need some sort of high score chart then (longest survival, best general defense etc)
  4. are you one manning it or do I want to go to the trouble of coding friendly AI? remains to be seen
  5. many ways to skin yourself: starvation, thirst, murdered by evil sea slugs, drowning.
  6. resource management: building walls to help keep the slug people out (especially when you’re sleeping), managing food and water.
  7. Limited resources? wood is from trees etc, you can catch fish, but maybe you have limited bullets (if you have a gun) or water (maybe you can find caches and stuff though? caves! giant bats and gremlins and freaky deep buried stuff)
  8. mostly closed system? you cant eat the slugs (they’ll poison you), but maybe there’s other animals around, and they could fight too, and die out?
  9. probably entirely fantasy based. all made up organisms etc.

That’s it for me for a while, I’m off to do english and go for a walk. hopefully I can make a decision before the party tonight and get something coded up. I’m looking towards #3 at the moment, but comments would be awesome 😀

Jesus christ. It’s been a rough day, but a damn fun one at that. It was nice to talk with some of you on IRC.  Hopefully it all works out in the end for those of you still flipping out about “my physics isnt even x at the moment” or “i forgot this what to do”.

Anyway, the game:

Currently, the player is a circle. he’s not on screen at the moment for the purposes of the shot. Other than that, there’s a lot of game left to insert. there is no menu. there is no points. there is no dying. this is practically final destination.

second last update. I’ll try to murder this bug before i go to bed, but seriously, what 😛

Got terrain destruction working, it just freaks out sometimes when it kills the player, and I don’t know why. This is not going to be a great entry from me xD

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=2001

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=2001

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=2001

What you're most likely to see at some point.

Enjoy if you can, I’m happy with the smoke at the very least 😛
Goodnight all, and good luck with your endeavours. Thanks to everyone who made this Ludum Dare damn good fun

Download Here

Finally kicked that bug in the face.

More stable!

I’ll do a proper postmortem soon, I’m glad to have got it done even if it’s late, I managed to actually find myself having fun with it in the last few minutes, so that’s a plus. Enjoy.

I say “preliminary” because it’s possible I’ll do a larger more in depth one later.

In making this game I made two huge oversights:

• I used a 2d hardbody physics engine to make a platformer
• I had a total of maybe 12 hours of usable time including a mad bughunt from 12-3AM and most of my basecode writing.

Nevertheless, I’m not disappointed with what I got out of it. I’m just about to do some spriting and make the game look less like debug-draw mode.

Things that went right:

• Everything got up and working quickly
  I did tiles properly and fairly efficiently, I got entities running their update(dt) lines within the first hour, a camera was quick to implement, it all ran along nicely.
• I prevented it from looking too terrible without assets
  seriously, the smoke class made the difference.
• I planned it for destructible terrain from the start
  That way there wasn’t any issues with me destroying tiles and the like, and it wasn’t just a thrown-in game mechanic.
• It isn’t too boring to play
  Me and my brother sat down for a good 20 mins or so having turns and laughing at ourselves. It’s pretty hard, made moreso by the whole running-out-of-space-to-play-in-thing and the you’re-weaker-than-all-the-enemies thing, but I feel that there’s quite a bit of gameplay there to be had, even if most of it’s emergent.

Things that went wrong:

• BOX2D.
  the callbacks i was using basically raped my game silly for just about all of its development time. I spent probably 7 of my 12 hours plagued by a recurrent bug that I just couldn’t squash. Turns out it was fixable by doing the good old mark now,  delete once resolved business, but goddamn I managed to set up those callbacks in a way that made that difficult. So, rule 1 for next time: set up a destruction system beforehand, or don’t use real physics when you don’t need them.
• Poor time management.
  The fact that I ended up with 5 hours development time, 7 hours bughunting should tell you something about how improvised the whole thing was.
• No art

Now with 99% less bugs.

All in all, it’s been an awesome learning experience. Grab/rate the game from Here.

I’ll be working more on this in the coming days, I suspect. It’d be nice to get a version with graphics up, at least, to give the game some context.

edit: fixed broken link.

Quickly whipped up tiles and got a better image drawing function than I had.

Got tiles rendering, and quite a few things ironed out in the meantime. Still need a set of debris sprites, I might do smoke but I kind of like the circles.. I need to make the tiles better though, and improve the level generation. Water should come soon as well.

I’m looking forward to this getting some atmosphere 😀 I’m thinking stormy backgrounds and possibly pirates coming in from the sides of the island too (I’ll need to improve the generation automata 12-fold, i think)

Sprites!

Inthusfar, that’s all the spritework. Heavily Cave story/Oryx/Spelunky inspired. Hopefully I can get the grass, flowers and entities drawing tomorrow, though I still need to do debris sprites and a lot of coursework. We’ll see how it pans out.

Ugly terrible sky, and stupidly placed ruffians, but I'm happy with the grass.

Guess what you can get your hands on? A post-competition alpha, that’s what! It’s finally got some content in it, and that kinda makes everything more enjoyable, or at least eye pleasing.

Any thoughts on jump height and water appearance would be much appreciated. Readme contains some notes and a changelog for those curious about such things, though it’s pretty brief.

Points for anyone who guesses which .zip is which.

Comments, criticism, etc would be lovely.

Well, hopefully I’ll have time to do something, be it jam for a while on something or even just work on something I’m already working on with the mood of the thing around me, but I’ve got a party on saturday and school on monday. Still, I might be able to get more dev time in than my last dare’s ~10 hours 😛 We’ll see, I’m keen for this actually. Hoping for an interesting but open theme. Explosions could be fun, actually.

I’ll likely be using flixel since I’ve gotten into that.

But I’m more likely going to work on Prelude in the few spare hours I’ll have than try to get a game happening within them. I actually had a cool idea for it, I’m not sure if I should attempt it though. Might get a sketch up in a bit, however I thought I may as well put out the opportunity for people to complain about me not doing it properly.

There are now two options:

• Work on Prelude, a 2d platforming fort construction game with zombies, where I’ve already got some progress and can use the amazing atmosphere of a LD to boost productivity
• or work on <name TBA>, where you ride rampaging elephant robots into each other for as long as you can until you get stomped.

decisions, decisions.

I’ve got an idea for what I might do but I’m going to go for a walk and ponder the possibility a little; I’ll get back to you.

I’ll be using Flash with Flixel for my framework, Gimp for pixelling, and Geany for text editing. I might make some music but sound is unlikely unless it’s just sfxr fiddling; no time for proper foley.

The challenging thing with springs and flixel is the lack of easily implemented sloped collisions, but I think I’ve found a way around that with my design

I’ll be keeping the graphics as lores as I can while still being descriptive for this, I’m thinking I might try for a 4×4 base and see how it works out, but I might be forced to go 8×8. We’ll see how it goes, I just don’t want to burn all my time for Art as I’m never able to commit to the whole 48 hours and end up getting ~10 hours production time.

Let’s get it AOWNE! >:D

Well, it’s very late for the Mini-LD but I only started on it yesterday and now it’s a game, so there’s something.

I used Arne’s 16 Colour palette and a 4×4 tile grid, and went from there.

I’ll build a page for it tomorrow, and likely polish it quite a bit more, but you can play it here: http://www.1bardesign.com/experiments/springbots.swf

For the time I’ve put in I’m very happy with it.

Instructions:

• Go right
• Collect Stuff
• Don’t run out of bounce
• R to reset

Have fun, comments appreciated.

tonight or tomorrow
flixel
photoshop
god knows if there’ll be audio, probably sfxr

Going to make a single screen stress platformer action… In the next 12 hours, a minimum 8 of which will be spent sleeping.

Wish me luck.

Submission link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2001

So uh, I’m off for the night.

Got editing etc in at the cost of not actually having many levels in-game, heh.

Still, it looks pretty and does what I wanted it to. Huzzah.

I’m more or less at a loss about exactly why sometimes saving to the clipboard works and sometimes it doesn’t. Browser specific? If anyone with more expertise could shed some light on it that’d be fantastic.

Good luck to everyone who’s still got work to do!

I thought the compo started 5 minutes ago, but I guess I’ll just have to get the theme when I get back from fishing. Bugger.

I’ll be using Flex (mxmlc), Flixel, GIMP, maybe sfxr, musagi and audacity if I feel like making sound (it’d be the first time..) and a whole lot of elbow grease.

Expecting to spend about 10-15 hours total on my entry -> scope limitation is probably a good idea. Will be my first time doing an LD on a windows machine.

I am going to have to find time for this because it is significantly more awesome than whatever else i was planning on doing but damn, even though I’ve been watching the clock on and off its snuck up on me. Better get rating stuff then.

No way in hell am i going to have time for a practice game or two haha, likely to be working up to the starting themepost. (in IRC to not contribute to the mass F5 on the compo page)

(When in doubt translate the idea to latin)

Guess where most of the time has gone, haha. WIP naturally, and not all of them shown (including the shepherd herself, as she's not rigged yet) but needed to get lunch and figured a progress update was in order.

The game is going to be about caring for and defending the sheep of the world. I’ve mocked up the world space (its like 200mx100m with some curvy bits cutting into that) and thought quite a lot about how I want it to play. Lets see how the execution goes, haha.

So, unity wont run properly on my laptop (will try again later for a jam entry perhaps) so I’m stuck with nothing to do.
Postmortem time!

What went wrong:

• Time allocation: Maybe going to a jam for saturday wasn’t a great idea in terms of getting a compo entry done. If I’d done something in Flixel then I would’ve been sorted (my 2D workflow is definitely fast enough, my AS3 knowledge is up to scratch, and I’ve used it for a bunch of LDs before). As it was, too many things went wrong for me to get any actual gameplay in
• Wrong end of the stick: Though I always do this, I should really code some stuff before drawing stuff. I continue with the design on paper and in my head while I’m creating assets but without a working prototype I end up with an art game that’s not even really a comment on anything.
• Really goddamn slow level creation workflow. My level creation workflow basically involved marching around the level first placing gameplay elements (~10min) and then placing graphical elements (~2.5hr). Hot damn I need to find a way to speed up the second step.
• Not familiar enough with unity. This really only mattered when I wasted an hour tracking down a bug which was caused by animation not playing if the animation calls are made from a different gameobject. Note to self, animation script on the thing with animation, anything else might get called at the wrong time. D:<
• Sound/Music: Every time I do this, I forget that sounds make everything more fun. Bugger.

During animation crisis hour: WHY ARE YOU STUCK IN A T STAND?!?!

What went right:

• Graphical Cheeriness: I’m fairly happy with how the graphical side of things came together given the short time I had to get anything done. There are definite holes in my 3D workflow but over the course of yesterday it certainly got faster
• World Design: The world came together mostly as I envisioned it, with a few key missing points: no dock (though I’ll be able to make one from the assets), no door on the house (???), no woodshed or seed shed.
• Gameplay Design: If I got the gameplay implemented it should’ve been pretty fun. Just got to finish a few assets and write a few scripts. Sadly, I didn’t have time (fingers crossed for postcompo).

Animation working, Planting stuff working, Ragdolling working, Scary cave not working, trees kinda working, no sheep, no wolves, final destination.

Bottom Line: Unity is quick for some stuff (making the planting mechanic work nicely took like 10min including messing around with prefabs). Should allocate more than 12 working hours to getting a 3D game done next time

Happy Ludumdare, hope to get a postcompo submission out in the next few days!

Link to LD page!

Technically a jam entry but uh, 7 hours in and I’m done for now.

Apologies for the kinda spammy graphics, time constraints

Might drop a fullscreen version in a bit for those that want to see it a bit closer, will just be monitor stretchy 800×600 though, haha. i imagine the window is beyond tiny on modern screens, developed on 1024×768 ancient lappy though so skipped my mind.

Good luck to everyone and thanks for keeping the train of awesome rolling guys! Stay cool B^)