As usual I had a slow start, trying to come up with something matching the theme, and as usual I decided to just start making something and try to fit it into the theme along the way somehow. So far I have the basic walking and jumping, and a sword swing, plus a dummy skeleton walking around. Next up are the collisions (for weapons and for jumping on monsters), scrolling and monster attacks. In the mean time our designer is working on the backgrounds.

I think I’m getting a hang of that minimalism thing.

Slowly progressing. You can hit the monsters now, and they get thrown back by hit. There are also some sounds. Now I need to make the monsters do something more than just stand there.

Almost playable! The only crucial thing left is the player character death, and then I can start working on polish and such irrelevant things as start screen and such…

I added the awesome music that Łukasz Langa made, touched up the backgrounds made by Joanna Piechowiak, added the death and victory screens, packed it all up into an .exe file and a .zip.py file, and uploaded. Please play and rate it.

Now is the time of a couple of words about the making process. I planned to make a beat-em-up from the start, and was hoping to reconcile it with the theme somehow. I talked with Łukasz about the music and with Joanna about the backgrounds in advance, hoping that they will make some awesome things. And then the theme was announced, and I was crushed. For the first time in my life I had the team to do some really really awesome and elaborate stuff, and the theme had to be “minimalism”. Also, isn’t that a kind of a non-theme in the context of Ludum Dare? I mean, it’s implied in every LD! Not fair! But we went with it, and I think that both the backgrounds and especially the music turned out fantastic! This may be our best Ludum Dare game so far, but that is up to you to decide.

Not having to worry about backgrounds and music, I proceeded to thing about the gameplay. Initially I wanted something that would give you a sense of great agility and freedom — think about jumping around on the monster’s heads, hovering in the air with the sole force of the blows you inflict on them, and swiftly dodging their slow but powerful blows, until one hits you and sends you flying across the screen, smashing everything in your path… Yeah. I wanted a top-down view and gameplay similar to Rakugaki Showtime, but perhaps not as chaotic. Then I played a little of Advena on my phone and realized, that managing 2d movements *and* jumps on top of that is beyond human capabilities. So I decided to limit it to 1d and jumping — that should make it more manageable. I still wanted to have gigantic monsters and jumping on their heads, but it was hard to control the jumps. I experimented briefly with making it a mouse-controlled game — you would basically click where you wanted to have the highest point of your jump — but that turned out too hard. I needed something simpler. Then I remembered an old arcade game titled Ninja Kid (and its sequel, Ninja Kid 2) and thought that they had pretty fun gameplay, so why not use something similar. Except I didn’t have the platforms and the hero or the monsters didn’t shoot — so I made some tweaks to account for that. What was left from my original idea is the massive chaos and stuff flying around.

Hello ludumdarers, I’m in.

I will be using Python and PyGame again (not enough experience with PySDL2 yet), and I will try to make a roguelike game this time. Oh, and I’m going solo this time.

All the best to all of you!

I’m starting with the player character graphics and some simple floor tiles.

So I have never ever made music before — I teamed with friends to get that stuff done by them. But this time I’m working solo, and I really needed something, anything. So I figured out, how hard can it be? As long as I take some well known standard and stick to the pentatonic scale, it should be alright no matter what I make, no? So I watched a Milkytracker tutorial quickly and made this abomination: https://bitbucket.org/thesheep/helpings/src/tip/helpings/boogie.xm (if you don’t know how to play it, try VLC).

Tweaking the music has consumed most of my precious time (with dubious results), but I managed to throw in a bunch of random chairs and tables. Also, the player character is animated.

I plan to make a cooking-themed roguelike game, where you need to find condiments for 10 second helpings for your restaurant’s most important customer.

Since I’m not making any visible progress, here is a view of my workplace.

This is my first failed Ludum Dare. I made all the basic mistakes: too ambitious plan, wasted time fiddling with music, and, most importantly, complete lack of motivation by day two. I got sick, but miraculously recovered the moment I decided to not work on the game anymore. So this is it. Good luck to everyone, I hope I will do better next time.

The weapon of choice will again be Python and PyGame. This time I will try pixelart, though, instead of pencil sketches.

So, they say “you can’t make a roguelike game in 48 hours, that’s why we have the 7 day roguelike”. I will try anyways. So far got the level generator (graphics to be raplced with something I draw during the LD):

Even if I fail this time again, I will have something useful from this. I made reusable, general-purpose window-drawing routine.

This is the actual graphics that I’m going to use. I still need to draw the monsters.
Drawing a Miko costume in like 4 pixels is not easy…

The monsters now walk around, attack and chase the player if attacked. I also added full animations, so it’s no longer jumping from tile to tile.

You can pick up items and look at them in your invetory. You can also deal damage to monsters (and be hurt yourself), but there is still no death.

I’m a little late, but I’m in again, with a relatively uninspired Boulder Dash clone in my plans. I will see where I can take that idea further.

I have the basic walking around and digging, and also some gems and boulders that defy the laws of physics and float in the air…
Next up: gravity! Also: actual levels, not just random stuff.