So, finally got around to posting here. So here is a late: “We’re in, yay!”

That’s two German programmers, for the first time taking part in Ludum Dare. We go for a jam entry because we wanted to work together; even though this means taking monday off from university.

Language/Libraries: C++/OpenGL/SDL/Irrklang
Engine: Some basic code from previous projects, else custom built 3D
Sound: sfxr, and some music generator
Art/Models: C++
Timelapse: chronolapse, this will be fun
I wanted to compile for Google Native Client, but we wanted to use a few libraries which are not available there, so no web version for our game :-(.

First Day experience:

After theme announcement at 3 am we had a comfortable amount of 7h of sleep, got breakfast and started brainstorming. We decided for a concept quite quickly. It will be a game about a genie trying to escape his world in a bottle. (Is ‘Genie found in a bottle’ a good name…? Probably a bit stretched…)
So on with the coding. I’m quite rusty in C++, but getting better again. So I didn’t got too much done today. I implemented a sphere tessellation algorithm, starting with an icosahedron. Took a long time debugging some heap corruption (oh how I missed C++…) and other stupid bugs. But at least this works quite nicely now.
Maik implemented a Menu and  the event handling system, we have gamepad support(!).

A few screenshots:

I’m really excited how this will turn out. There is quite a bit of way to go. I think we can probably finish coding, the interesting things will be graphic and sound.

Now sleep.

Hey!

Is anyone using python with pygame on OSX? I would love to distribute a Mac build for my game but I don’t own a Mac and am not really experienced in packaging applications there.

Under Win and Linux I’m using cx_freeze to build a binary version of my game and it works perfectly. And it should also work “the same” for MacOS. So if anyone is using the same toolchain under OSX and could help me build my game for MacOS this would be really cool

…that is if I can finish anything worth building at all…. right, coding!

(Ah, I should mention I’m using python 3.2 with pygame.)

Yay! We actually kinda finished our game!

I mean there are a thousand things which we wanted to add and tweak but you can actually play the game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11335

Take the place of one of histories greatest philosophers and battle your opponents with philosophical concepts and clever word plays. Try to convince all other 8 thinkers of your position by attacking their sanity and crushing their conviction.

Please Play and tell us what you think!

There are 9 people to chose from and the only weapon allowed is your wit. Every Philosopher has 3 basic attacks and 3 attacks unique to his respective worldview. The coded library of phrases includes actual quotes and somewhat corrupted quotes. Damage dependents on the attack and your own and your opponents sanity.

We had a long struggle to get the user interface to work properly and display every item at its right place. Planned improvements include more special attacks and animation as well as more philosophers and phrases.

Please give us feedback on the balancing! Tell us which philosopher you would most want to see in the game!

We finished our little game about the newly established democratic voting system of the animal not-kingdom. Shape your electoral districts to win the election, because Gerry wins! (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering)

So this is our interpretation of the shape shift theme, because we soon agreed, that we wanted to make some sort of puzzle game. The fact that the overall topic is currently of interest is sheer coincidence. Nevertheless, we “jumped on that bandwagon” when it comes to the game’s style and overall design.

Although we unfortunately had no time for a music theme, we are quite happy with the outcome.

We even managed to finish our AI implementation for the game and it isn’t playing completely terrible. On small boards it is actually quite decent I guess, if you don’t pay attention you’ll lose :-). But there are still quite a few things to improve on, maybe I’ll go into further details in a separate post about our AI implementation.

So give it a try! Who doesn’t want to be a anthropomorphic animal candidate in an important election! And don’t forget to vote (meaning: rate and comment ;-))! We are happy to hear your opinion!

Wolf to move. I don’t think there is a way to win this game…