This is my 4-hour late declaration of intent to join MiniLD 28 and also my first progress update.

I really don’t have time to participate this weekend, but the theme is just too awesome to pass up on!

I’m going to try to do a simple little tribute to The Ancient Art of War. I’m using AS3 & Flixel (for the first time) so please wish me luck – I’m going to need it!

Here’s an early screenshot:

Menu Screen

I’m afraid I won’t have time to finish Ancient Arts far enough to submit… too much work and Flixel took a bit longer to figure out than I had hoped.

I’m quite happy with my graphics and animation and hope to come back to this later when I have more time to actually prototype the gameplay!

You can play with the rough prototype at my website.

Here’s a final screenshot:

Menu Combat

Ok, fine…

I confess…

I lied about being a spy…

But I am in!

I added the Espionage theme a few weeks back and to my amazement it made it to the final round, so I can’t not be in! This will be my 4th LD and I’ll be using Java with Slick2D and a little library of my own. I’m very excited about the themes, there are so many good ones this time!

Good luck to all and enjoy!

Tags: java, LD21, LD21 Im In, Slick

Woke up an 1 hour and 40 minutes ago and saw the theme… To be honest Escape wasn’t one of my favourites (ranked about 8th on my list) and my poor little Espionage… dead last :(!

So I’m going to follow jonbro’s advice and make an Espionage game to celebrate the fact that a theme I suggested at least made it into the final round! It will still fit the theme… after all: getting into a top-secret, ultra-high-security underground research facility is much much easier than getting out!

I had a few ideas, but they all sucked… then I came up with a great idea (hinted at above) while soaking in a nice hot bath… It’s ambitious! Probably too ambitious to do in 48 hours, but what the hell – I want something I can continue working on after LD this time, so I’m going to go for it.

Everything or bust!

I’m in for my 4th time (I think). It’s been a few years since my last attempt…

I’ll be jamming with my cousin and maybe some other people from the office.

We were planning to use LibGDX, but after wasting last night trying to get particle effects to scale to my physics world we’ll probably go with something a bit easier to get started with like Unity or Phaser.js instead.

We’ve made pretty good progress on day 1 / 3 – given that we have very little experience with Unity…

We were lucky enough to find a Western sprite pack from http://shop.software-atelier.ch/ on OpenGameArt, which saved us a huge amount of time badly drawing our own! It’s just taking a huge amount of time to get them into Unity in a usable format, but I’m not complaining – they look great compared to anything we’d have done on our own:

We’ve also started adding some more terrain; the bad guy’s shotgun attack is working well; and our protagonist’s unconventional attack is kinda almost working!

Going to get a bit of sleep now, before continuing in the morning. The plan is for me to start hammering out more tiles and characters. @SasVDWesthuizen will get started with some sound recording as soon as we have all the basic game elements working well enough for me to start building the levels.

I’m in for the jam along with my cousin and another colleague from work. We’ll be joining the Johannesburg real world gathering organised by Make Games SA on Saturday and Sunday.

We’ll be using the following:

• Language: C#
• Engine: Unity 5
• Graphics: GIMP & InkScape, we’ll likely use some free game art if we can find anything applicable to the game we end up making
• Sound: BFXR & Audacity, possibly recording some of our own audio

Looking forward to this one as it’ll be our second time using Unity and I’ve done a tech demo or two since the LD32, so we have a much better idea what we’re doing this time around.

We are coming in with the pre-conceived idea of making a match 3 game and getting it onto the Android app store, so this won't be our most creative jam, but we do want to push ourselves to get something published for a change instead of just producing yet another cool throwaway tech demo.

Tools

• Unity
• Visual Studio CE 2017
• Piskel

The day didn't start off too well, with about 2 hours lost to getting our Visual Studio projects working properly with each other and with Unity (if you're going use a complicated DDD approach set it up the day before).

Once we got going we managed to build most of the domain, but ran into some more severe difficulties with getting Unity mouse input working with 2D and then with our presentation code doing weird things... but at least we have most if it sorted out now and we can finally drag tiles around and match them with one another:

Screenshot: https://chaotik.co.za/content/images/2017/04/Unity2017-04-2222-44-17.png

Tomorrow we'll implement dropping down tiles after a match, spawning new tiles a scoring system and then figure out how we're going to work in the theme and add some content.

We were hoping to finish today since we're both working tomorrow - we didn't manage that, but we made good progress nevertheless. I spent most of the day on art, menus and such - slightly premature polish I guess. Sas finished all the mechanics that we were aiming for in the domain and also did a lot of work helping to hook that up to Unity!

In theory we just need to implement proper handling of our game end conditions on the front-end now so that it navigates to the level screen instead of coming to a jarring halt - then just add content tomorrow...

In terms of content we mainly just need some levels that gradually up the difficulty which should be easily achievable with just adding more configuration. Other than that it's just sound and music that we didn't get to today and maybe a few small animations here and there on the fairly static level menu screen.

Below are some screenshots of our menus and the main game screen:

Our entry is up!

I'm quite happy - I think we've managed a decent attempt at a match 3. Also the code isn't as complete a mess as is usually the case with our jam entries, so we could take this project and run with it to get something published for the first time.

My cousin and I are in! We might also be joined by a colleague tomorrow, we'll see...

We are both software engineers, so this time around we want to try and focus on our creative skills instead of writing a bunch of complex code - the creative skills are a bit limited, but we'll see how it goes...

We'll be using: * Unity 5 * Visual Studio 2017 with C# * Piskel * Boscea Ceoil

We are a bit exhausted from the push to finish our GitHub Game Off entry, but we are in!

I am ever so slightly down with the flu, but hopefully Sas can do all the hard coding work while I just focus on art and game design this jam. As always we'll be using Unity.

Good luck to everyone!

This is the first time in more than a dozen jams that a theme I wanted has won, so I'm very eager to get started as soon as my cousin gets here!

I made up some ideas for all the themes during final theme voting and we're probably going to try and execute some form of a FPS Collectable Card Game (debate on how exactly to commence soon).

We'll be using Unity as that's what we're most comfortable with and are very likely to use pre-made assets from the Unity Asset Store and opt-out of Graphics, because we don't have a lot of experience with 3D.

We're having a little get-together at the office for the first day of the jam with a handful of people hopefully coming to join us for day 1, so we might end up picking up additional recruits if anybody lacks a team or an idea.

We tried to make an FPS Collectable Card Game, which was biting off a bit more than we could chew...

FPS was not a problem, but we decided to go networked multiplayer and ended up battling to figure out how to attach weapons to our players for about 1.5 of the 3 days in the jam!

In the end I managed to figure it out about 10 hours before the end of the jam for me but @Cyberwiz was already out due to work... I got pretty close to a playable prototype in that remaining 10 hours, but do not feel this is close enough to waste people's review-time with. Here's at least a video of how far we got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Uo3Ce21Nc

We learned a hell of a lot this jam and I think the concept is amazing, so I consider this jam a success in-spite of failing to submit. Hopefully we'll get a post-jam version up on Itch in a week or two once we've sorted out all the kinks and have had some time for polishing.

I'm slightly in in the nick of time!

We're away with my wife's friends for the weekend, so I have limited internet and limited time, but I'm going to see if I can put together a simple little game. I'm on leave on Monday, so worst-case I can spend Monday finishing up a jam entry if I don't finish by Sunday evening.

I'll be using Unity and Aseprite. I've also been dabbling with turn-based strategy mechanics today, so I'll be using this code as my starter project.

Me and @cyberwiz will probably be jamming together again even though we're a continent apart now (at least we're still in the same time zone)!

We want to try out PICO-8 - so not much to tell by way of tooling - we'll use whatever is bundled with PICO-8. Hopefully the severe constraints will help to curb our ambitions and help compensate for the fact that we'll each probably only have about one and a half days out of the three to work on our game.

Good luck to everyone and may the theme be less hateful than usual!

I made a tiny warm-up game in 2-3 hours while waiting for the theme announcement: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=35550

We've been off to a slow start - we went to bed after the theme reveal and had a few things to do this morning, so we've mostly just been kicking around ideas and then rejecting them in between everything else...

We've now eventually decided that we can do something interesting that fits the theme based on the warm-up game I made in the 3 hours before the theme reveal, so we're starting with that little bit of base code and assets as our base and will then iterate on that to try and turn it into a full-fledged game.

Here's a link to what we're starting with: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=ld45warmup-0#p

And the cartridge that I posted just after the theme announcement:

We have been super-relaxed this jam! I lost at least 3 or 4 hours today on errands and trying to get my new internet provider working, my cousin has mostly been composing music instead of touching the code - yet in spite of this we're having what might arguably be one our most succesful jams ever!

Our primary game loop of exploring, collecting coins and avoiding or fighting monsters is mostly there - it just lacks more sophisticated dungeon layouts and monsters. I just finished the first version of the shopkeeper, which provides the secondary game loop (what am I trying to buy next to make me stronger). This will soon also reveal the final goal for the ternary game loop (the most expensive item that the player needs to try to buy to win the game).

Here's a short GIF showing the player buying a sword, collecting some coins and killing a monster:

And here's a clip of the song my cousin composed: https://soundcloud.com/matt-v-d-westhuizen/ludum-dare-45-game-music

Now for some sleep, then tomorrow more items, more monsters, some traps, better procedural generation, better (actual) AI and lots and lots of polish!