Welp I’m here.  I might participate in future compos.

I voted that’s what!

I just totally voted.

Also guess what, I’m going to totally participate in LD18!

I will use flash, which will probably be pretty crappy, and I don’t even know if I will end up with anything usable.  I’m going through a tutorial right now so like, it will probably be restricted to the game type that is made in that tutorial, which is like some crappy 1942 rip-off, but darn you, if I won’t shoe-horn it into the dang theme!

Also I might totally be busy that weekend because my niece’s b-day is August 21st (to my bday being August 23rd), and then again if we don’t hear from my brother’s family I might totally be unbusy, and like “dude, I should participate in LD18”

It will be a most excellent LD with me in there, you can count on it!  Or not with me as the case may be.

My participation was contingent on being able to finish an as3 tutorial sufficient enough to be able to make a game with.  Turns out there’s something wrong with my version of the tutorial game, and I’m tired enough that I don’t feel like spending anymore time trying to figure out why mine fails and the tutorial demo’s doesn’t.  So it looks like yet another ld of non-participation.  Maybe I’ll be able to do something for LD19.

A couple of comments on my post last night, and a few guys in the actual #ludumdare irc channel convinced me that maybe I should try again.  Only I have to go through some tutorials to learn some stuff.  Not that I was giving up on flash or as3, but just the compo.  But now I’m going to go through some tutorials and see if I can’t submit a modest entry.  I’ve decided to start with Flashpunk instead of Flixel for a couple of reasons.  1) The tutorials are linked right from Flashpunk’s front page, I don’t see that with flixel, so I have to dig a bit, 2) I’ve talked to ChevyRay and he seems like a nice enough dude, whereas I’ve not talked to the Flixel creator, but he’s probably a nice guy too.  I’ll probably eventually make games in both to see what I like best, but for purposes of this competition i’m going with Flashpunk, and we’ll see if I can do anything, I have pretty limited time.

I have a tendency to quit and restart alot.  Okay maybe not.  I haven’t ever really quit anything except for star-catcher, which might could say is just shelved for the time-being.  I’ve already officially started PoV’s challenge, and officially quit, and officially restarted again.  So I make a sub-challenge — Guess how many times I quit and restart.  The one closest to how many times I quit and restart will get a credit in all 3 games I am working on (a 4th project is a port and so I can’t really put you in those credits).  My current PoV Challenge game, my flash shoot’em up, and Hypno-Joe — provided any of these gets finished.  A quick qualifier — This first time I quit and restart didn’t count.  So a zero count means you don’t think I will quit and restart again.  1 means you think I will do it just once from now, and so on.

Here’s a bit of chat that started it:

<Uhfgood> I think I can honestly say that I can get this game, I was working with sgstair on, done in amonth
<Uhfgood> so you know… I might actually re-enter the challenge, provided I can rebuild this prototype in flashpunk in a short period of time
<Uhfgood> I wasn’t going to but because this actually looks doable 😉
<Uhfgood> mrfun – I may have to end my reign of slacktitude
<mrfun> uhf, is it ok if we make a sub-contest guessing how many times you’ll quit and restart the contest?
<Uhfgood> mrfun – Yeah
<Six> mrfun: I call 6

Good luck, good luck to us all!

Ballsy

Basically I added some sounds (and some description to each level), and called it done, I then proceeded to create a games page and add it to IndieFlux my game review website.

So hopefully that will drive traffic to IndieFlux and then maybe earn some views which will in turn get me some adds from project wonderful. I don’t know if I’ll make any money with this game, it’s probably kind of lame, but still it was fun to essentially complete my 4th game (that was actually of my own design and coding).

I’m going to continue to work on the game though, and when I have polished it enough, I might take it down and put it on FlashGamesLicense — I sort of doubt I will get a sponsor though.

To play the full size version go here –
Ballsy! Challenge Version

I would like to know if anyone could tell me about how many hours they actually spend working on their LD entries. It’s not feasible to spend a full 48 hours (although I wouldn’t doubt some have tried) — So we’re looking at at least one night of sleep which is 8 hours approximately — that leaves at the most 40 hours of work time — but you’re probably spending 32-36 hours.

I am going to catch up by doing a game for each of the past LD themes on my own time. I am deciding how many hours total to spend, and it shouldn’t be more or less than a typical LD’er spends on his or her game. I don’t want to do any more than 2 hours a night, and I might not get to weekends. So I’m basically going by the week. If I don’t do weekends it’s 10 hours a week — so at least 2 weeks for a total of 20 hours (although I believe the average LD’er probably spends more time than 20 hours) If I do weekends too it’s aproximately 14 hours a week for a total of 28 hours.

In any case please comment!

Most of the time I don’t participate in LD’s because I’m usually busy on the weekend.  So I thought why don’t I have my own LD compo.  So I asked some of you how much time you spend on average… so it’s pretty common to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-35 hours of actual dev time.  (Dev time can include planning time).  So I thought how much time can I spare per day, and the answer comes back to me, 2 hours.  Okay so then I ask myself how long, and then answer comes right back to me, 3 weeks.  Actually this was through careful deliberation.  I figure about 30 hours is a good roundabout figure and something I could actually manage if I were to participate in an actual LD.  Of course this presumes using up most of my available time, and 2 good 8 hour sleeps.  I was thinking about also trying on weekends (but this was when I was going to do 2 weeks).  So here’s the plan:

I will go through each LD theme and build one game in about the same time as it takes to do an actual LD compo by spending 3 weeks per game, and 2 hours per night starting around 9:30 pm – 11:30 pm pacific time.  I will not be doing mini-ld’s at this time.  I will more or less follow the rules of LD.  By essentially making everything from scratch, except I will probably use a premade helper library.  I’ve decided I would do these games in flash so I can immediately put them onto IndieFlux in the games section.  Originally I wanted to use the lua-based LOVE engine but instead realized that flash may make it more readily accessible to people.  I’m thinking of actually porting it to LOVE later but we’ll see how this goes first.

And… that’s… it…

Thanks for your advice thus-far (those who I’ve talked to in #ludumdare).  I’m going to start tomorrow (Monday, March 21st, 2011) with the beta ld which was 24 hours, and thus I will do one week (about 10 hours, hope I can make something by then).  (Indirect interaction).  So see you then!

Keith

Tags: indirect interaction, LD00

I had to actually “re-learn” flashpunk a bit here… but I finally got my first screeny up. What I came up with for indirect interaction is a game like Toobin’ where you navigate rapids in an inner tube. But since you can’t directly control the player, I decided that you would use the winds to change your direction. But instead of an inner tube I decided to use a raft, maybe like Huck Finn traveling down the Mississippi River and you have to navigate things like sharp rocks, whirlpools, waterfalls, dangerous crocodiles and the like. Although I haven’t set up a definite plan for that yet. What you’re looking at is a rough raft graphic (just a brown rectangle) on a blue river (although I plan to change the blue because that’s too much of a sky blue.)

Tags: indirect interaction, LD00

This time I added two basic “bank” rectangles (just to show where they are) until I decide what will go int he background. And two cloud images (which are merely two colored rect images, I’ll be updating the images in the coming days). You can actually move this left and right but it doesn’t do much other than that.

Tags: indirect interaction, LD00

Well it took the whole two hours but I finally got a tilemap up and running. The tilemaps in this game are going to be dynamically generated. but at least we have something resembling a river. The first one is the regular screenshot, the second one is an error. I’m using Flashpunk and apparently the tilemap seems to be getting created correctly, or at least the map array is.

Tags: indirect interaction, LD00

Well here it is… the next screen.  This time with rocks!  And a demo

Demo here: http://www.gamesafoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/LD00.swf

Tomorrow I hope to add some sort of gameplay, I guess with time running out, I’m going to make it continually speed up and allow you to hit the rocks thereby restarting.  Or something like that.

Tags: indirect interaction, LD00

And now with more game!

Here’s the link to the new demo.  Left/right arrows to move, and avoid the rocks.  Game starts over once ended.

LD00 Demo number 2

And now the link to the semi final version – HERE

Tags: LD #00 - Indirect Interaction - 2002, LD Catch-up

Final version of LD catch-up #0 — same as in previous post but included here for completeness.

Okay a brief readme:

Who am I?

Keith Weatherby II otherwise known as Uhfgood

What is this?

It’s a game made in 10 hours based on the Ludum Dare #0 (beta) competition with the theme of Indirect Interaction.  It was a 24 hour test compo, and since I have only about 2 hours a weeknight to spare I decided to do this one within a week.  My upcoming games will be about 3 weeks or 30 hours.

The rules are simple move left and right and dodge the rocks.  See how many levels you can pass.

The source code is copyrighted by me as well as all content including the lovely <ahem> art.  Source code is free to use as you like (although I doubt you’ll even care to use it).

It was written with FlashDevelop and the Flex 4 SDK as well as Flashpunk.  The FlashDevelop project with flashpunk is included in the source distribution.

Here’s the source.

Timelapse will be forthcoming.

Tags: final, LD #00 - Indirect Interaction - 2002, LD Catch-up

Now a new LD catchup is upon me so I turn to the Guardian theme.  I’ve decided to spend tonight sort of brainstorming.  I may draw some diagrams some temp-temp art and maybe a mini-design doc, or more like a design outline.  My idea for the Guardian thing may not be new at all.  In fact it’s a take on a well worn game genre, the space invaders type of game.  Well what could you guard in a space invaders game.  The player, “Duh”.  You know those little barriers from the original game that protected you briefly from the shots of the enemy.  Well this time you ARE the barrier and you’re going to protect the “player” which will be some sort of AI-thing.  This game should take approximately 30 hours give or take, but no more than 32 hours.

Tags: LD #01 - Guardian - 2002, LD Catch-up