This is my first Ludum Dare and I’m gonna be participating in the Game Jam. I will be using the XNA Framework and a game library I’ve been working on that handles input and other basic functions.

Here’s my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14440

The crazy story of my Ludum Dare experience is in the description. TL,DR: I forgot to make sure I had the weekend free, and ended up making the game in under 4 hours. Crazy day. Congrats to everyone else who finished, I can’t wait to play as many of your games as possible.

Last time I made other plans without realizing they would conflict with LD, but I still managed to throw together a crappy little game with square graphics and submit it. This will be my second go around, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to contribute something actually good this time. I’ll be using C# with XNA, as well as my personal game library which uses Farseer Physics.

I’ll be working in a team of 2, both of us coders. We’ll make the game in libgdx, most likely using the Oryx Design Lab sci-fi sprites. Neither of us has ever made an RTS, and I haven’t played many of them, either. So this should be interesting.

So my game is a slightly more punishing variation of Speed Chess, where each move is limited to 10 seconds and you can miss your move if you take too long. I used LibGDX, and the game is designed for Android devices but you can play it on your desktop (sharing a mouse). Ideally two people would sit across from each other, sharing a tablet on a table, but I have tested it on my HTC One and you can still play it with the minimal screen space.

I made a LOT of progress today, in about 8 hours of work. The game board and all the pieces are implemented. I also implemented castling, en passant and pawn promotion. I’m not planning on implementing non-queen promotion, are there any chess players here who would be greatly disappointed by this? Also – you win by actually taking the enemy king. I felt this introduced a bit more fun to the game, because you have to watch out for check, and also avoid losing even after being put in checkmate due to your opponent’s negligence. Thoughts?

I made the graphics myself, so yeah. Sorry for the poor quality. Tomorrow’s work will be entirely polish (unless I remember any more glaring flaws in the gameplay). I’m going to add the menu, and a nice victory screen announcing how long the game took. Here’s a screenshot:

The 7 is counting down, which you probably can’t tell based on the still picture.

My game, Ridiculous Chess, is complete. I uploaded a .jar that should run on Mac, PC, and Linux (I have only tested on PC) as well as a .apk for running on Android. If you have an Android, I recommend side-loading the app so you can play with another person on a touch screen. There is no single player, because I didn’t have time to write any AI.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14440

You can now download my game and play it directly on your Android device, for free! This is my first app on Google Play, so I’m super excited. It’d be awesome if you could play and rate my game, both here and on Google Play.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.natman.chess

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14440

I wrote a blog post announcing my participation in the October Challenge, and explaining a little bit about my game concept. You can read it right here. I’m pretty excited!

I released my October Challenge game, Ninja Space Pirate, on itch.io today! I made it in Libgdx so I’m planning on publishing the Android version to Google Play by tomorrow.

This morning I felt inspired to get up and make a game. I have loads of homework and other obligations this weekend, but I can always get to those tomorrow…. Right?

I’m gonna be working with JavaLib, an open source library I helped make, built on top of Libgdx.

https://github.com/LostCodeStudios/JavaLib

My art will be done in Gimp, my sounds in bfxr.

Time to get started.

I wasn’t able to make a game this weekend, but I’d like to contribute anyway by offering detailed and honest feedback on as many games as I can.

If you want feedback on your game, give me the link in a comment on this post, or send it to me on Twitter, @nelson_nleroy.

I’ll be alternating between school assignments and playing LD games to keep myself productive. If I don’t get to your game today, I will try and continue this through next week.

I hope to see some great, inspiring games!

This will be my third Ludum Dare. I hope it will be my most successful, since I’ve been planning on it for weeks, and I’ll have more time to devote to the game jam than my two past LD’s.

Tools

• OS: Xubuntu (I switched to Linux for the first time about a month ago and I love it)
• Language: Lua (I’ve never used it before, but I’m planning to use it as my scripting language in larger projects, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to get some experience with it.)
• Framework: LÖVE (I chose this over Corona SDK because it’s totally free and I’m targeting desktop, not mobile)
• Text Editor: Vim (Because I got sick of Eclipse and Visual Studio and decided to learn something radically different)
• Source Control: GitHub (Source control. It’s like health insurance.)
• Graphics Editor: Pyxel Edit with WINE (For programmer pixel art)
• Sound Effect Generator: Either bfxr or jfxr (because I’ve always used bfxr in the past and I saw jfxr on /r/gamedev but I haven’t given it a try yet)
• Music Tracker: Bosca Ceoil (If I have enough extra time to make a simple and hopefully unoffensive soundtrack through trial and error)

Work Station

A standing desk I built out of Ikea parts. Foot stool for shifting my weight and stretching my legs.

And of course, my invaluable anti-fatigue mat! It’s an Imprint Cumulus Pro, if anyone’s interested.

Obviously I don’t expect to work while standing for the entire duration of the jam. When I need to sit, I’ll work on my laptop.

I also intend to put something together tomorrow for Warmup Weekend. I’ll be posting time lapses of both my warmup weekend and my actual Ludum Dare development.

I’m really excited because I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many good themes in a single round of voting before. I voted mostly based on which themes I’d personally prefer to work with, but I downvoted some themes I thought would create too many boring games that I wouldn’t want to play (specifically Labyrinth, though maybe it could be cool if interpreted as the movie).

Of course, there’s no such thing as a bad theme, so I’m sure I could work with any of these themes if  I had to.

So I recently made the switch to Linux, and my basic research told me that I could use Bosca Ceoil on Linux without a problem. I guess I didn’t look closely enough, because while trying to actually install and run Bosca I had to jump through way too many tedious hoops because Adobe Air no longer supports Linux.

I was planning to use Bosca for this LD48, but since it’s such a pain to get it running, I’ve decided I probably need to look for something else. I’ve wanted to learn MilkyTracker, and it appears to support Linux officially, but it’s probably too late in the game to learn and become comfortable with such a complex tool in time for next weekend.

So, does anyone know of any simple alternatives to Bosca that I can run on the newest version of 64 bit Xubuntu?

I didn’t like this batch of themes near as well as the last one, but the six that I picked had me really excited.

In 48 hours I managed to finish my first attempt at a puzzle game using LUA and LÖVE. Here’s the link if you’d like to check it out:

One

I’d also like to offer detailed and honest feedback to anyone who wants it! Comment on my game’s page, or this post, with a link to your game and if I have time I’ll play it through and leave you my thoughts. If I don’t like your game, I’ll tell you, and I’ll do my best to explain why. If I love it, I’ll do the same! I’m also totally open to hearing your honest opinion on my game.

I made a time lapse of my gamedev process to make “One“, my compo submission. I hope you’ll find it interesting!

Hello! My coding partner and I are making a game in Phaser for the 72-hour jam this time around. Our game is called gnoPortal, based on a concept tweeted by @moshboy.

Pong + Portal =

We’re working together from Will’s house, and we’re both live streaming at the same time! You can check out both streams on Twitch:

Mine

His