I’ve been following Ludum Dare for a couple of competitions now but this will be my first time participating.

Tools of the trade:

Code: Python & pygame or C/C++ and SDL
IDE: Eclipse or Visual Studio 2010
Graphics: Photoshop programmer art
Sounds/Music: Good question, sfxr and Audacity perhaps. If I get really ambitious I might mix up some loops in Torq 2.0.

It will be interesting to see how this goes. I haven’t really prepared for the competition but I’m hoping this will spike some motivation in the days/weeks to come.

I’ve been playing with C/C++ a little bit but I might stick with Python this time around since I’m sure I’ll have more than enough on my plate.

Take this, take this, take this!

I’ve been thinking about how to develop based on this theme and have some ideas, but I’m not sure how things would unfold. I have some humour and a rough idea for a story. Two brothers taking on the world? Hmm, maybe.

I didn’t spend too much time looking at the themes when voting but I came up with an awesome idea for evolution, that could also ride off of the theme for this contest. An item that evolves based on your playstyle and battles? That would be kinda neat, but it touches more on evolution than “Here, take this”.

I really want to go in the direction of overhead view adventure/rpg… but I’m not sure if time will really allow for it. My programmer art skills are limited to say the least, and then there’s filling out a story and some dialog. Time to ponder some more.

I decided to go with the adventure/rpg route and I’m currently looking at tiled map generation. The player would start in a town and perhaps buy/sell items and then explore the world (see screenshot) where treasure and enemies await.

I’m thinking that if a battle occurs, it can be resolved RPG style by cutting to a battle scene and choosing to use options or items.

It’s also 5am and I’ve been awake for 22 hours. I might go watch the sun rise and put on some coffee

So, we’re 7 hours in and I’ve been without sleep for 26 hours now. Time for a status report!

I’ve been plugging away at some code and trying my hand at drawing sprites. I need to get transparency working and I’ll need to move away from mspaint to do that. The core game is starting to appear but things aren’t fully hooked up yet.

Here we have a wonderful placeholder of a title screen.

Clicking “New Game” takes you to the world map where you can start exploring for riches, or napkins, or whatever Adam West deems as important.

Oh no! Adam We has discovered a rogue plant. Hopefully the “Jingle Keys” attack will calm it down.

Stay tuned for more adventures mishaps from Adam We.

So I’ve been spending some time looking at the combat screen and have looked at implementing a simple menu like system. Reminds me of some old school games I played back in the 90’s.

The menus respond to mouse clicks but I might implement some keyboard commands for those that don’t want to deal with a mouse (seeing as movement is done via wasd or arrow keys anyways).

Would anyone be interested in trying this out early and provide feedback if I get something a bit more playable?

I’m still here and kicking. I took a bit of a break from Ludum Dare earlier today and got some well needed rest, and continued to think about how to tie the gameplay into the game I’m making.

The combat system has been mostly implemented and hooked up into the rest of the game. In fact, I now handle player death as seen below.

For the gameplay itself. I want to redo the world map and try an isometric view, art skills pending. The goal of the game will be to reach an objective on the otherside of the map.

The path will be filled with animals that thirst for our hero’s blood. In order to make it though, our hero will have to decide if he wants to trust random people he meets along the way. Friendly NPC’s will offer items to aid our hero, but beware. There are others that do not appreciate our hero’s presence. It’s dangerous to go alone, but don’t let first impressions fool you either.

By no means do I consider myself an artist but this came out quite well.

Making other people should be a bit quicker. Hopefully at least.

So much to do but there’s so little time. Better get back to it.

Wow, time flies.

There’s still a lot left for me to do but I’ll see if I can submit something into the 48 hour competition. I mean, I’ve made it this far.

I’ve been fighting with sound and py2exe for the last bit. I have a preview up so far with some roaming enemies and you can walk around and fight. You start the game with 8 pieces of bread. Hurray!

I tried to test this on a WinXP virtual machine. You need Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtimes to run the exe, otherwise you’ll get an error. However, I couldn’t seem to click on anything in the main menu, but it worked fine on my Windows 7 machine.

We’ll see what happens I guess :s

Download link can be found here – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27865321/adventures_of_adam_we.zip

And with that, I’m spent. If it wasn’t for work in the morning I’d switch to the jam but oh well, I’m happy to have something submitted… even if it’s still very much a WIP.

Tools Used:

• Python 2.7

• Pygame 1.9.2.pre-release

• PyPubSub-3.1.1b1

• Eclipse 3.5.2

• PyDev 2.0

• Py2exe

I managed to get a start on sound tonight and fixed up a few bugs along the way. There were a lot of features implemented in the final stretch, and now some of the NPC’s wont attack you but may offer you an item instead.

Items only give health, and I added the hp amounts next to the item name in the use menu while in battle.

Anyways, you can find my submission here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=preview&uid=3002

My subconscious is trying to tell me to play through Earthbound again. A good amount of inspiration for this project came from my memories of the game.

I’m quite happy I was able to take part in Ludum Dare. Perhaps I’ll take part again in August.

Time to wind down a bit and get my first good night’s rest in almost 72 hours

This was my first Ludum Dare competition and I managed to make a submission. I’m really looking forward to taking part again next time.

I can’t say I’m proud of the fun factor/end user experience in my game. In retrospect, I should have spent a bit more time on front facing features (making the world scrollable to enlarge the game world, more varied artwork, sounds). But in hindsight, I’m extremely happy that I was able to get an RPG prototype running in 48 hours.

My submission for LD20 can be found here.

What Went Well

• Python and Pygame was an amazing choice. It’s great for rapid prototyping and shines in LD. But be warned, vanilla pygame doesn’t have menu support.

  My code should be multi-platform as well, which is an added bonus and gave me more time to think about the game ahead of me. I never would have made it this far this quickly using C/C++.

• I took breaks and got away from the computer. While away I would think about the progress made in the game and try to think of features or solutions to problems I encountered. In a few cases I found some good solutions, but I also brainstormed ideas on other areas of the game.
• Test Driven Development: I’d write some code and fire up the game to try it out. I would often start with a class skeleton that would balloon as I added features to it. Often I would start from scratch or extend from an existing class, but on a few occasions I found good opportunities for refactoring. As a smaller project I could stay on top of a lot of the test cases and quickly go through them as I worked on a feature.
• Platform testing. When I compiled the game using Py2Exe I set aside some time to test on a freshly formatted WinXP virtual machine. This is where I discovered Py2Exe depends on Visual C++ 2008 runtimes and I was able to include this in the readme.

  Testing also revealed issues with Py2Exe and buttons in WinXP, and the confirmation that my code worked with Python 2.6 and the official version of pygame (as pygame for 2.7 isn’t available on the main site yet). I didn’t spend much time looking into the issues once I found out the game runs fine when running from source due to lack of time.

• Artwork. Going into the competition, I remembered I was going to have to make my own artwork. I am no artist and my initial posts show the programmer art I came up with. I spent a few hours on Sunday learning how to draw character sprites and managed to create something that was quite presentable.
• Motivation/Attitude. Participating in LD made me forget about pessimism when it came to brainstorming feature work. This made me very productive and kept me motivated throughout the competition. Hopefully I can keep this mentality in mind going forward.

What Could Be Improved

• Gameplay. I had a great idea to tie in the theme with no time to implement the features to support it. As a result I more or less threw the game onto the existing features in the final hours and I think it’s fairly noticeable. Ideally I wanted the player to travel through the world with a mix of enemies, without being able to identity friend from foe when it came to people NPC’s (this would be the tie in to the theme). But without a larger map and non-human enemies this concept is missed.
• Linux: I have a linux VM but I didn’t get a chance to confirm my game worked on it, perhaps after this post.
• Game type: Turn based RPG might be a bit too ambitious for a solo competition, especially when you include graphics and sound. An action RPG may have been a better choice.
• Sound: Sound was also thrown together in the final hours and I’ve never really worked with it before. I also delay button clicks in the battle screen until sounds stop playing. This delay makes the game feel like it’s lagging if the player clicks through menus quickly.
• Combat formulas: Prototyping this at 2 or 3am for an hour in Excel is rushing it a little bit
• NPC speech: Again, something I should have looked at sooner rather than the end.

Well, that’s that. Try out my game and let me know what you like/don’t like. It can be difficult to get third-party feedback outside of competitions like Ludum Dare.

It’s been a year since I last participated so maybe it’s good to try again. I’ll be keeping an eye on theme and may end up throwing my hat into the ring.

Code: Python & pygame or Kivy
IDE: Eclipse
Graphics: Photoshop programmer art
Sounds/Music: Sfxr

It’s time for another LudumDare, and I think it’s also time for me to take part again.

I’ll use this weekend as an excuse to get to know Unity a bit better, and we’ll see what I end up doing.

I don’t see myself going full-on development this weekend, however my goal is to have something that others can play by the end of the weekend.

Tools I’m considering:

Engine: Unity3D 4.6.0b17 (Planning to check out the new UI features)
Code: C# via Visual Studio 2012
Graphics: Gimp (if needed)
Sound: SFXR, Ableton Live 9 (maybe? I see the novation launchpad as an interesting way to generate some new sounds from samples).

Have fun everyone!