This month I will be participating in the October Challenge.

I plan to port my game Untitled to HTML5 and place in on a web game portal.

While I plan to do a port of the game, I would also like to add and revise the game as needed to work best on html5. I plan to keep both versions, but I don’t think that the game is served very well by being an exe download. The gameplay is simple and fast, a very casual game. By porting it to html5 I hope to find an audience for the game that is currently lacking.

It depends on where I am at with my assignments. I plan to submit something, but with finals next week, and a few assignment still needing some work, I’ll have to attend to them first.

I’ll be using:

Construct 2

bfxr

Photoshop

Otomata or the python music generator.

No title yet, but I think I have a solid idea, and have made steady progression towards executing it. I have basic mechanism in place, and have started on the primary mechanism. Bases, upgrades and enemies.

I also live streamed myself making it on YouTube:

Tomorrow I will be live-streaming in a  couple different sessions, probably one from 8am to 10am, then from 10-12 I have to go finish some school related stuff, from 12-4 I may be streaming then  6-8 I’ll probably be streaming. The videos will show up on my YouTube account when I am live. http://www.youtube.com/user/Ythmevge

I have a title now, R.B. A. You’ll find out what it stands for later. today is always where I draw the line for adding new features, so I’m declaring the game feature complete. Tomorrow I work on sounds, music, and art to replace the placeholders. There are also a few GUI effects that I want to get in, and some balancing still needs to happen. right now, I cannot even beat the game on the hard difficulty.

Today I live streamed as well. the first streaming went from 1:48 pm to 4:30 pm PST, can be watched on YouTube.

The second stream went from 6:42 pm to 9:50 pm and ending in a  rage induced bugfest.

The only thing that has been done off camera was some bug fixing after the Day 2 part 2 stream. I just really wanted to have it done and ready for finish line tomorrow.  So I’m off to sleep, and plan to get sound, music, and some new graphics tomorrow.

Progress this morning is going good, I have most of the bugs worked out, and probably the final graphics. Now its onto sound, music, and then to wrap everything up.

Part 1 of the live stream:

Lunch:

Part 2 of the livestream, and the last part, will start soon on my YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Ythmevge

Tags: foodphoto, progress

A timelapse creation video of R. B. A. is out now on YouTube, just in case a 12 and a half hour livestream (multiple parts) is to long for you to watch.

You can play and rate here.

I’ve shifted into finals mode this week (almost over). Then I will be playing and rating games actively, my goal is 5 per day (and makeup the days lost to finals) So by the end I will have rated 100+ games.

Tags: timelapse

My weekend is mostly clear. I’ll get a late start on Friday night…but Friday is just for ideas anyways. This will be my 7th time participating in Ludum Dare (and in a row)

I’ll be streaming on YouTube (seeing as I still haven’t properly tested twitch yet) You can watch my channel for the stream. http://www.youtube.com/user/Ythmevge/

If possible I want to use photography in my game. Particularly Pinhole Photography as Sunday is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (http://www.pinholeday.org/) If I’m unable to implement it into my game, I’ll be taking a break for a chunk of Sunday to participate in it.

I’ll be using:

Construct 2

bfxr

Photoshop

python music generator

I spent the morning making photographs with a pinhole lens to use in my game. I have 20 photographs to work with, and it wouldn’t be hard to go and get more.

Now I will be starting a live stream to process the bulk of the photos and begin to create a game. I have all of the game systems in mind It will just be a race against the clock.

Feel free to tune in at http://www.twitch.tv/ythmevge or find it in the widget on the right.

So far this morning I used my pinhole lens and photographed a bunch of toy soldiers.

Then I started livestreaming around 4 hours ago, and have the basics finished for my game. The pieces can move around, and shooting will be easy to add.

I decided to keep movement really simple, you can only move forward. You move by clicking on the one you want to move. You also cannot jump your own guys. the tan guys are computer controlled an move randomly forward.

I’ll start livestreaming again at 6:30 PST (about an hour) or thereabout. We will get them shooting at each other after each move, and then begin to balance the game. I’d also like to start on adding stuff to the big white spot on the left.

This morning I decided to finish up the look, as well as scoring, and you can now win or lose. The ghosted fallen soldiers are just that, the location they died at. added instructions and stuff on the left side. I also changed out the background of the board. before I rushed and just popped a wide angle lense on my camera to zoom out and get the shot, I just put the lens out of focus to give it a blurry effect. Now its a true pinhole image, and it looks essentially the same.

I’ll be live streaming in around 30 minutes at http://www.twitch.tv/ythmevge I’m going to be adding sound effects and music. I’ll try to do more commentary this time around and make it more interactive.

This will be my 8th time participating in Ludum Dare in a  row.  My goal as always is to create a game that is different but improved from the last one, as well as to pick a political and or social issue to explore inside of a video game wrapper.

Part of my weekend will be lost, so I’m not sure how much time I will have, it may be a 24 hour challenge for me. My University starts Monday and I will be moving down this weekend.

I’ll be using:

Construct 2

bfxr

Photoshop

python music generator

So 10 seconds, I hate this theme. The problem is its not really a theme, but more of a variable that you have to use. My first idea was clone McPixel, with a 10 second timer instead. but eventually I moved past that idea. Onto another equally impossible one. I have been wanting to try to do a seed generated game for some time now… Ludum Dare doesn’t seem like the best time to learn that. So after messing around with that for a while, I settled on randomly generating (within a fixed boundary) I’ve done this before in around half of my Ludum Dare entries, so it will feel familiar,

Progress shot:

So today I lost most of the day to moving, and resuming classes at the university on Monday. I found a few hours tonight to do some stuff, and got the bulk of the gameplay elements worked out. I have a few other ideas that I want to add, and then I need to add an ending. Then sound, music, and some kinda of title page. if I were to magically have time, I would add a score into the game.

In the screenshot you can see that the character marker has changed, as well as being inside of two different colors. The background was also changed to a buff/off white color.  I also changed the controls from what I had yesterday to be entirely mouse controlled.

I saw the theme to this mini Ludum Dare, and immediately knew what I wanted to do.

Almost 2 years ago I released a game that I called Untitled, that game started as an entry to Ludum Dare #21, I spent another year or so polishing the game, and adding features.  While its not my first game, it is the first one that I really considered and put a fair amount of time into.

For more information on the game:

http://untitled.allaroundgames.net/index.php

I’m happy with how the game plays. The shortcomings for me are the interface, and the accessibility of the game. Having to download a client to play something that could be done in a web browser didn’t help the appeal. The original client was made in Construct Classic, as it is now called.

For this MiniLD I will be recreating the game in Construct 2, and reorganizing a lot of the backend features. provided I have time I will also revise the website. I don’t know that I will complete the remake this weekend, but it will be finished. My immediate goals for this weekend is to have the gameplay elements all working correctly by Sunday.

Day 2 for me is coming to an end, I would like to be farther along, but I’m not. I continued from where I left off last night, with a working level generation, I completed that…then 6 hours later realized that I did it “wrong”. It was working correctly, but there was a better and more efficient way to do it. So I deleted what I had, and redid it. Next was to get the basic player movement in, that is simple in Construct 2. The problem arose from the collision mask that Construct 2 generated. The generated masks were very inaccurate and upon inspection, some were just wild. I just completed realigning all of the collision masks, and I’m going to call it done for the night.

The screenshot above shows the Starting screen, with the Play window open (well it doesn’t close yet). Inside the Play window you can either click on one of the complexity levels to use a preset level generation, or you can make you own by inputting numbers.

Tomorrows goals are to get the color selecting in, as well as the Abilities and Traits and with any luck scoring. A bonus if I had time would be music, leaderboard integration into the website, sound effects, mobile controls, and just about anything else you can think of.

This morning was spent working on the Traits and Ability in the game, as well as selecting colors. Now by selecting a color you can take on the trait or ability that the color has, as well as travel through the color you have selected.

I’m submitting the game now, not because its done, but because I’m not sure if I will have time later. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-47/?action=preview&uid=3966

Provided I have time, I will be adding music, sound, scoring, and leaderboards. I would also like to add some how to play information.

For Mini Ludum Dare 47 I decided to recreate my first complete game, Untitled using Construct 2 and thus html5.

What Went Wrong:

– It wasn’t planned, It was the end of Thanksgiving week and I happened to check this website. I liked the theme so I decided to go for it knowing that I would have less time.

– Its a rather complicated game, and I wanted to keep the Leaderboards the same. I lost a good chunk of time on generating the levels, in the same way. I think I redid it 3 times during the weekend.

– Scoring is complicated, I was in the process of adding it during the weekend, but ran out of time. That more or less left the game in a non-game state. Mostly its complicated because I wanted your score to be calculated on the website, so its sent in variables and then calculated there. But it also has to be displayed in game, so I calculate it there as well.

-Collisions When I imported my sprites to Construct 2 the collision mask that was generated was a mess, it has some really weird things going on so that look time to fix (but it works good now)

What Went Right:

– Construct 2 worked great, other than the collisions I had no problems with it.

– html5 I feel is a better platform for this type of Art game, its much faster and easier to get at than downloading a client.

Future:

– I will be finishing the html5 version at some point, but right now I’m not sure when as its getting into Finals week.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

This will be my 8th time participating in Ludum Dare in a  row.  My goal as always is to create a game that is different but improved from the last one, as well as to pick a political and or social issue to explore inside of a video game wrapper.

I may lose some time to studying for a Final that I have on the following Monday. But it should work out.

I’ll be using:

Construct 2

bfxr

Photoshop

python music generator

I may use a highscore table script on my website (source code is in one of my past entries)

You Only Get One is the theme that I was hoping for, I liked how open ended it is and think it will add variety to the resulting games.

I didn’t have an idea at first for the theme (well I did, but some were very cheesy, and I had other goals) After about an hour I came up with a concept that would work with the theme, and my own goals with the game.

First Screenshot below shows the basics of the game. The world wraps around. basically you pick up pips, and avoid touching the green platforms. I have an idea of how I’m going to fit the theme in, but its late and that’s what tomorrow is for.  I still have a ways to go, but normally on Fridays I don’t even start the game before bed.

Headed off to bed soon, but first meet The Collector.

With included Online High-Score table. My game is functionally complete, just a few small things to change, then add some sound effect, and music. There are four difficulty levels, each changed the speed that platforms go green, as well as the pickup spawn rate. The scoring is simple in that you pickup the pickups for 50 points, or wait until the end (or end it yourself with Enter) and that will give you 100 points for each green platform. You Only Get one theme comes in on that you only get one end to the game, one chance to collect as many green platforms as you can.

There are 255 platforms spawned at the start of the level. So a chance for a score of 25500 points if you manage to avoid all of the green platforms Plus whatever you collect from pickups.

The Scoreboard is Online and posted automatically when the level ends. On the main page you can view the top 10 for each difficulty (loaded when you select that difficulty) There will also be a webpage that will show all of the scores. (I’ll be resetting it tomorrow to clear out my scores)

That plan tomorrow is to finish up the help menu area on the screen shown above, add some sound effects, add some music, and then polish it in any ways I can think of.