I’ve been a long time observer of these Ludum Dare contests but have always happened upon them right as they are over.  This will be my first entry!

I am not comfortable doing an art and dialog-heavy RPG, so for the theme of “All Talk” I have decided to take a platformer and smash it down into a game about talking.  The idea is that instead of directly controlling a platformer character, you talk to one and convince it to do what you want.

The idea has evolved into a herding game of sorts.  You are character who is trying to convince all of the little peons to go to the right side of the screen.  There is apparently some great danger on the left side of the screen.  You are opposed by an adversary who is trying to convince all the peons to go to the left side of the screen where he is either trying to eat them or capture them or something like that.

So you are a single platformer character controlled with WASD, and when you are colliding with a peon, you can talk to it to convince it to either walk left, right, or jump by using the arrow keys.  If a peon is doing something you tell it to and collides with another peon, it will try to convince the other peon to do the same thing.  So everyone is talking to each other.  All Talk you might say.

To make it more interesting, each peon will have a rank (and probably some other attributes) that determine whether or not it succeeds in persuading.  The game will basically be an action game to see who can herd the peons to their side fastest.  I might even try to squeeze in a multiplayer where one player herds to the left and other to the right.

I am a big fan of Reddit rage comics, so all of the peons are various rage faces.

I am writing it in Javascript with the HTML5 canvas.  I have been needing to learn Javascript better for a long time and this gives me an opportunity to check out the new features of HTML5.  So far I am very impressed and am excited about the possibility to make browser games without any plugins at all.

Hopefully I get this done in time!

The game will live at least for now at http://lifelessboring.com/minild27 so give it a play if you are interested.  I will try to keep at least moderately playable versions on the live site.

What happens when giant aliens come and invade the tiny in comparison planet earth?  An equally non-tiny hero must come to their rescue!

Howdy all, I’m David Colgan.  I’ve seen these LD contests many times but always seem to find out about them 12 hours into the competition.  This time though, I’ve made substantial progress and am hoping to finish my game!

The idea is you are a space giant of some kind, protecting the tiny worlds of earth and the other planets from giant aliens by flying around the solar system and punching ships into each other and into the planets.  This game has involved a lot more math than I had anticipated, and I’ve had to dust off my high school math skills multiple times so far.

My obligatory battlestation shot showcases the many things that make coding more exciting for me: espresso-laced cereal in a cup, plenty of apples, my programming duck, an Irish tin whistle, trusty Microsoft ergonomic keyboard and optical mouse, SAD lamp for illumination, planning paper, and my development environment of Arch Linux running Gnome terminal, Vim, and Chrome.

My game is written in Javascript using HTML5 canvas.  I’m pushing changes live anytime I have a working state to lifelessboring.com/ludumdare28.

And yes, I just realized this is LD 23, not 28.  But, the link is already been published elsewhere.  Close enough!

This will be my third Ludum Dare, and I’m excited to see what comes of it.  Each time I’ve done a bit better, and I’m hoping to finish a game and make it polished.

I’ll be using Coffeescript, combined with jQuery, Underscore.js and IvanK WebGL libraries.  Vim is my text editor with Cygwin and Windows 7 as my OS.  My game will certainly work on Chrome, probably Firefox and Safari, and we aren’t making any guarantees with IE. 😉

My friend Steven is also going to be participating across the room from me, while my other friend Jesse will be providing moral support and playing WOW.  We have an ample supply of apples, oranges, cardboard pizzas, V8 fusion energy drinks (I LOVE these things), and homemade cookies from Steven’s awesome mom.

Well folks, it is the halfway point.  Things have gone okay in the David camp.  Not quite as chargingly fast as I had originally hoped, but I have learned quite a bit in the process.

It may or may not have been the best idea to use a new language and graphics library for this contest, but I thought I would be adventurous.  I’ve recently been doing a lot of freelance websites that are Javascript heavy, so I thought this would be a good time to try out this shiny new Coffeescript thing that I’ve heard so much about.

I enjoy simplicity over complication, so I decided to first try to compile my Coffeescript in the browser.  This worked fairly well at first and I got up and running quickly, but between that and using the minified version of IvanK.js, I had zero stack traces and therefore no clue where any syntax or runtime error occurred.  This went on for a while until I got sick of it and decided to find a solution.  After fighting a losing battle with getting Node.js’s Windows version to install Coffeescript that could be seen from Cygwin, I finally came across this Github repo, which allows me to simple put Coffee.exe into my project folder and then a Vim post-save hook compiles Coffeescript into Javascript.

I’ve also had fun learning IvanK.js.  Ivan has ported the Flash Actionscript API to WebGL.  I’ve never really done anything with Flash, so this was a bit of a brainbender, but at this point after several wild goose chases and bug hunts, I think I’ve finally got the hang of it.  So, if I don’t finish this one, I’ll still have learned quite a bit, and Coffeescript is definitely going to be in my web development arsenal in the future.

But, I’ve got a good base, and am excited about the next 24 hours.  My game is codenamed “Futbol Manager Twenty-Twelve Million.”  Current progress can be seen at http://lifelessboring.com/ludumdare24.

In the words of Strong Bad,

In the past my game attempts have been foiled by being too ambitious.  So for the October Challenge I’ve decide to try a different approach: make something very simple but highly polished.  As such, I’ve settled on a space shooter, currently codenamed Shooty.  Unfortunately, there are quite a few other space shooter games called Shooty or something similar, so I’m still deciding on a name.  I’m writing it in Impact.js, which is turning out to be the best Javascript game engine I’ve used.  In past competitions I’ve tried to make canvas games from scratch or from other lesser-known engines, but I haven’t made nearly as fast of progress.

I’ve got a page with Google ads up, which will be my method of monetization.  If you’d like to try it out, go to:

http://lifelessboring.com/shooty

Any and all feedback is appreciated.  Currently you use WASD or the arrow keys to move your ship around and the mouse to aim.  At this point, if you die, refresh the page.

I’m optimistic about at least finishing this game to a playable state by the end of October.  If I make it that far this will be my first completed game!

So, more progress is being made on my space shooter game.  Thanks to a very funny bug that resulted in a ship being spawned every time an enemy hits the player ship while the player ship is invincible, I now have a really fun idea for a powerup:

This powerup will cause maybe 20 ghost ships to appear out of your one ship and collectively allow you to destroy every enemy on screen with a powerful barrage of thousands of bullets!

And yes, there are less than 0 lives remaining in the screenshot.

This will be my fourth Ludum Dare, and this time I’m going to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes as before.

• This time I know my tools a lot better than in previous compos.  I am not learning the toolkit during the contest.
• I’ve been practicing my pixel art, so hopefully this time my graphics will not suck quite as much.
• I am going to make sure that I don’t pick an idea that is too ambitious.  I didn’t get anywhere close to being done last time because my game idea was super complicated.

My toolkit this time is going to be:

ImpactJS –  HTML5 Canvas engine

Paint.NET – graphics creation

Cygwin/Vim/Git – my IDE of choice

Famitracker – 8 bit music

Bfxr – Sound effects

Also, I will be most likely making a game using an NES-esk style.  I’m limiting myself to the NES’s 56 color palette, using no more than 3 colors per sprite, making all graphics in 16×16 squares, and will be attempting to create some music using Famitracker.

We’ll see how this goes!  As everyone else seems to be, I am super excited for the start of Ludum Dare.

And of course, my obligatory workspace picture:

I’ll be using this small boilerplate code file:

http://lifelessboring.com/ludumdare25/starting.coffee

It defines a skeleton for an ImpactJS game and also includes a simple particle class and the start of a player class.

Party!

This has been the best start I’ve had to a Ludum Dare thus far.  I’ve got a rough player sprite with several different animations, a rough tile set, a test level, and basic player movement.

My idea is thus: you are a scout minion of the evil villain.  In the distance is a giant army of bad guys, and you have to run to base and tell everyone before it is too late!  Being a scout, you have acrobatic skills, so the levels will consist of you doing parkour moves to get to the end before the time runs out and the enemy advances too far.

I’m still trying to figure out how all of that make sense – why doesn’t the villain just have cell phones or flying things?  Maybe it is a steampunk era or something.  Maybe the villain’s fortress is in a scraggly place and he can’t see very far without scouts.

As far as setting, I’m thinking the villain’s lair will be an abandoned nuclear power plant.  We’ll see if my pixel art skills are good enough to make it convincing.

My game is accessable at:
http://lifelessboring.com/ludumdare25/

Also, the ever so popular what I had for breakfast shot:

Eggs eggs!  I made them myself even.  Now back to coding!

Highly productive day, even with taking a few breaks and making food.

Speaking of food, dinner was a delectable sardine and rice concoction with a cookie made by my amazing sister:

I’ve finalized my idea in my head, now I just have to finish it!  The biggest hole right now is the player movement.  It is very buggy.  I’m currently trying to refactor my state transition code and hopefully I’ll find the problems.

Since my game is more or less in the NES style, I tried my hand at making some box art.  I may change the name, but for now it’s called Super Agent Run:

We’ve got a countdown timer signaling when the enemy army will arrive, a full level built, and a death sequence.  In this game, you die if you fall too hard or fast, but can tap spacebar to encourage your player to get back up.

I even managed to fit goats easily into my game in the plains level:

Party!  I really really want to finish this game, and I think it is in the realm of possibility.  Good luck to all at the halfway point!

I am super excited about Ludum Dare as usual!  This will be my fifth time participating.  Today I discovered the joy of streaming my coding process on Twitch.tv.  Thanks to everyone who watched – I had like 12 viewers at one point.  I will definitely be broadcasting during the competition this weekend.  Having people watch me helped me to stay on task a lot longer than I would normally have been able to.

My stack this time around will include:

Language: Haxe

Framework: NME with HaxeFlixel, most likely targeting Flash

Editor: Vim with plugins Vaxe and Ctrlp

Version control: Git

OS: Windows 7 with Cygwin

Graphics: Paint.net

Audio: Sfxr, Autotracker

And my obligatory workstation picture:

The hardware consists of a recently on sale purchased 1080p monitor hooked up to a Thinkpad T410.  So far this setup has rocked.

Currently the programming is still my strongest area, while my graphics are okay and my audio production quality is bad.  I’m hoping to someday master all three!

I’ll post my starting Haxe project later this week.

Good luck to everyone!

Tags: #teampotato, potato

Defend the citizens from the deadly potatoes of the potato monster!  Also, apparently you are surrounded by flaming potato meteors that just fell a few seconds ago (there wasn’t time to animate that).

WASD or arrows to move, and click to throw a knife.  You can play it at http://lifelessboring.com/potatoninja.

Also, spoiler, but POTATO WINS!!!

Tags: #teampotato, warmup ld26

Here is a picture of my setup:

Also, here is a picture of my bag of potatoes:

Finally, this is my starting project, and later will become my final source code home:

https://github.com/dcolgan/ludumdare26

Tags: Haxe teampotato haxeflixel flixel standingdesk

After about 3 hours of brainstorming I have decided on making an arcade-style, Froggeresque cross the road game.  You are a deer who really wants to get to the other side for some reason yet to be determined.  I’m hoping to be able to add some simple AI that allows the cars to change lanes and speed up and slow down depending on who is in front of them and if you are in their way.  Perhaps you the deer can cause some mayhem by crashing cars into each other.

You can play the game at any time at: http://lifelessboring.com/ludumdare26

After spending some time getting a basic game laid out, I decided to do some sound effects creation.  Having a nicer microphone this time around, I decided I was going to make my own, instead of using something like bfxr.  I managed to get a car horn sound by lowering the speed and pitch of a tin whistle played while holding the holes wrong, and I got some ambient car sounds by recording out my window.

And, I made a sound for when the deer moves by rubbing two potatoes together.  Even if potatoes are not seen visually in my game, they are there in spirit!  More sound effects will probably come at some point this weekend.

Also, thanks to my wonderful roommate Steven for the coffee, eggs, and sausage ensemble!

Tags: #teampotato, breakfast

Sadly, things just didn’t come together for me this time.  I had a decent idea but just couldn’t execute it.  Bugs delayed progress too much and I also apparently didn’t know my framework well enough to do what I wanted to do.  But make no mistake, I will be back to LudumDare again!

I’ve always liked action adventures over turn-based adventures, and so I like Zelda games more than Final Fantasy, at least in terms of gameplay.  So I thought, why couldn’t you have an RPG that was more Zelda-like?  Perhaps sort of like Final Fantasy Legend 2 for Gameboy.  And then I thought, you always have a party of 4 or so in an RPG, but could that be made, how you say, REAL TIME?  And such was born the idea for the Zelda RTS.

You have your party of 4 characters or so, and you control one of them like in a normal Zelda game, but control the others more like RTS units.  You press a key and time freezes, sort of like in Mass Effect’s menu thingy, and you can give commands to your units (or maybe time doesn’t freeze, or maybe that could be a difficulty level setting), such as telling the mage to cast heal, or the archer to target a guy.  And then you the swordsman can battle like in any 2D Zelda game.

This is what I’m shooting for this week.  Yesterday I accomplished:

• Resized the tiles to better fit the game
• Got moving from screen to screen working, would like to add a transition effect at some point
• Figured out how to deploy the game (I’m using ImpactJS)
• Attacking units and killing them (though no death animations yet)
• The beginnings of the dialog system
• A good start on a state system and swappable AI
• Tinkering with weapons and finding some of what works and doesn’t

I found that setting a timer and working until I hit 8 hours really helped me to get stuff done.  I clocked in at 8 hours and 46 minutes yesterday.  I’m going for the same today, and will be streaming a good deal of that on my channel at http://twitch.tv/dvcolgan.

And some screenshots:

I’m hoping for an Earthbound-esque feel.

Live right now on http://twitch.tv/dvcolgan for your viewing pleasure.

Tags: #7DRTS

Hello all!  This will be something like my 6th Ludum Dare, and I’m just as excited about this one as the ones before.  Since my completion rate with traditional game engines has been hit or miss, I thought I would try something new this time.

I’m a web developer by trade, and the library I know the best is the Django web framework.  So I thought, why not make a game using Django?  Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with this approach and have found it to actually work pretty well.  So I’ll be looking to make some sort of MMO website game thing without any rendering engine other than plain old html and css.  So, tools:

• Python/Django
• Django Rest Framework
• The Python Imaging Library
• Coffeescript
• KnockoutJS
• Bootstrap 3

I’ll be streaming the whole time, starting by at least 6pm EST today if you want to join the party!

twitch.tv/dvcolgan

My starting code base can be found at: https://github.com/dcolgan/ludumdare27

Also, obligatory workspace pic: