Today was a busy day, but I finally have time to start with LD! I’ll probably participate in the jam to get that extra day. My tools:
Happy LDing everyone!
Hmm, now let me think about the theme…
About 10 hours of work down. I’m actually kind of happy with the result, but I think it needs more work.
Working title: Tsunami Cruiser.
It needs more and more interesting enemies, more levels, more balancing, polish, sound, etc. I will continue work tonight. Maybe I should turn this into a jam entry so I can put more work in it?
You can play it here!
As always, the morning after LD48 I feel a little dazed. Not because of lack of sleep, but because there is this new game sitting there, that wasn’t there 48 hours ago. This time the time span was even shorter, as I started on Saturday night, and the actual coding was done within a 16 hour span on Sunday. I spent most of the time on the waves and player mechanics, and had only 4 hours or so to add the enemies and finalise the game. The result is something quite playable, though I discovered a number of bugs/quirks afterwards that luckily did not detract from gameplay.
>>>PLAY THE GAME ON WINDOWS, LINUX, OSX, OR ANDROID<<<
This time round, I think the result may be worth making a bigger postcompo of.
Today I’ve been playing with Shadertoy to create a new wave effect (check it out here, the link didn’t work earlier, but works now!). It’s something like below (my gif grabber does not allow subtle gradients, so use the link to get the more subtle coloring). I wonder if this is the right graphical style, because I am going to have to adapt the other graphics too. Note that I do want to keep the bubbles. Time for some experimentation!
Very happy with it! I aimed for fun, and expected to do fairly well on graphics and innovation. For me it’s good news to get ratings I more or less expected, as I sometimes get carried away with my own personal gamedev experiments, which can be a little too obnoxious at times.
#53 Fun 3.87 #110 Overall 3.77 #242 Innovation 3.53 #276 Graphics 3.62 #374 Mood 3.19 #376 Theme 3.46 #507 Audio 2.85 #849 Humor 2.00 #1547 Coolness 45%I got #42 innovation, #109 overall on my previous entry Nom’s Evolvathlon, but there weren’t as many entries back then.
The concept of my game Tsunami Cruiser is based on what came to mind first when I heard the theme. Actually it’s inspired by the somewhat obscure classic “Wavy Navy”. It was created in a single day. After I discovered people liked the animated gif of my unfinished game a lot, I spent the rest of the evening until the deadline (3 am) making the game as nice as possible.
The biggest complaint I got was that the game was too easy in the beginning. I probably should have made level 1 a little more challenging. And I have to (re)learn how to make a soundtrack!
I soon started work on a WebGL postcompo, which I am still working on. I chose WebGL, because it should be easy to port to OpenGL ES/Android later on. I’m new to WebGL, but I found it definitely easier to develop in than OpenGL ES Android. And it’s less fragmented than I thought. I’m probably going to use WebGL for the next LD.
A week later I had this silly idea that I wanted to implement right away. The result was Nyan Cat vs Flappy Bird clones, another WebGL game, and my second “cooldown game”. I came up with the theme because I was getting a bit peeved with the number of Flappy Bird clones appearing on the Ouya appstore. LDers seem to like this game too, so I’ll keep working on it. And last but not least, I now got to #3 on the One Game a Month highscores list!
All in all a very satisfying LD this time. Thanks to everyone for your comments and support, for making great and inspiring games, and generally for making this event one of the most fun things to participate in!
Tags: #1GAM
Remember the 8 games I made for Ld#26? Probably not. It was one of my crazy experiments. But it did lead me to implement some genres I’ve done too little. Like platformers. I decided to take one of them (Roof Escape) and turn it into a bigger game. It started as a tile engine test for my new HTML5/WebGL game framework (more about that in my “I’m in!” post), but after more than a week, it turned into a lot of fun (for me, at least).
The problem with endless runners is that you don’t always get to shoot. This game tries to remedy all that by adding a flamethrower and loads of things to shoot at! Just remember to use your triple jump! Soon to be released for browsers, Android, and Ouya:
Super Pyro Runner ALPHA (html5) [Get the Android/Ouya APK here]
Tags: endless runner, html5, postcompo, webgl
LD has always been an inspiring event for me, so count me in! Again I’d like to present a new goodie along with my “I’m in” post.
This time it’s a Javascript port of my JGame 2D game engine, jgame.js. Download it here, along with my latest game Super Pyro Runner.
My tools:
Ok, just before the event starts, here is the latest version of jgame.js with a warmup game.
This version features a sprite batcher which enables 1000s of sprites at 60fps. That may be useful if you’re going to use WebGL as your weapon of choice. I even get like 500 animated objects with collision and all running at 60fps on the Ouya.
>>> Get the jgame.js 0.3 source here <<<
You can find the warmup game here. I wanted to test my sprite batcher, so I thought: let’s make a zombie game. I found myself drawing little guys with hats instead, so I thought, let’s make that zombie bankers! Music: “Bad Monday” by 8bitdnb.
Good luck to everyone!
This was the first time I used my new html5 toolkit I developed in the previous months. I was a little nervous about that, as I finished some important parts just hours before the start of LD.
After trying several ideas on paper, I stuck with a “connected cannons” concept, which is something I like to explore further. After about 8 hours of experimenting with different variations I had a finished looking game, and submitted it. I was pleasantly surprised to get multiple comments almost immediately, and the positive comments encouraged me to go on.
By the end of the day I had the game features pretty much down, but had this niggly feeling that I hadn’t tapped the full creative potential of my LD weekend. I kept thinking about other games that I wanted to make. Since my game was chaotic and trippy anyway, I thought about adding subgames at random points in the gameplay, with a contrasting style: neon (modern) in the main game, coarse pixels (retro) in the subgames. The subgames were going to be about my personal fixation with shooters. The idea is that the player can go into a subgame to save his/her ass when shields are low.
I quickly created some “programmer drawn” concept pixel art, which looked more satisfying than usual because I had decided to use only 6×6 pixels (8×8 with outline).
2/3 into the weekend, my game was about finished, with different types of cannon mirroring, 4 enemy types with variations, and 30 difficulty levels, and I had the feeling that putting more work in it would hit the “law of diminishing returns”. Time for subgames! I created a Frogger clone and the code for warping back and forth. I still had two hours left, so I created a Pacman clone as well.
The good!
The bad!
The game looks something like this:
And… the subgames go something like this:
Hi again, I just got out of bed and am in for my 7th Dare (if I didn’t lose count)! My tools:
Coding: jgame.js (my pet JS game engine)
Graphics: gimp, inkscape, evolvotron, my random sprite generator
Sound: sfxr, audacity, microphone, and possibly some music tool
Good LD to you all!
I just uploaded a “prototype” version of my game Makeshift Defense for early feedback. It’s only got 2 weapons, I am going to add at least 4 more.
Ahh.. the weekend can begin! Lock myself in my room with a stack of my favourite tin cans. Don’t answer the door. Turn off the phone. Only in the late afternoon, come out for swim.
My goal this time: to produce music in the 48-hour compo. None of my LD games had music. I spent several days trying different music tools, and found LMMS to my liking. Good for minimal techno. Goes nice with flickering backgrounds and crazy explosions. I will probably make a fast action game where you have to look everywhere at once, a game that is neurosis made tangible.
My tools are the usual.
Platform: WebGL and my homebrew engine jgame.js
Graphics: gimp, possibly my random sprite generator, possibly Evolvotron, possibly Apophysis.
Sound: *fxr, microphone, Audacity
Music: LMMS
I started this compo with one specific goal: to have music in my game. In the week before the compo, I spent a lot of time learning LMMS to brush up my (very) rusty music making skills. The final result is not only a game with 4 soundtracks, but also a quite playable one with nice graphics.
On day one I had some non-gamedev duties, but spent most of the time on the music. I only had a bare bones shooter that didn’t really feel like a game yet. After creating the “warp tunnel” style animated backdrop on day two (which is a WebGL shader that maps a texture using polar coordinates), I changed the game into the radial shooter that it is now. I spent literally 20 minutes on the enemy sprites, which are generated by my random sprite generator. The backdrops are generated with Evolvotron as usual. I worked on to the last minute of the submission hour to add the finishing touches.
Hi again, here’s an update. I’ve just added touch controls so that my entry is now playable in Android (either in the browser or as an app). It’s also on Google Play.
Glad to see so many positive comments on my game. Thanks all for the feedback!