Hello, I'm back to LudumDare, after a bit of a break. I stopped taking part for a while, because I was busy with my foray into the world of hobby electronics. And guess why I'm back? Yes, I made my own game console, and I want to make a game for it. I do realize it will be a bit tricky to have it scored, but I hope that a video will somehow suffice. I certainly don't expect you to repeat my build, even though with ready modules it's not as hard as it seems.

In any case, the details about the device are available at https://hackaday.io/project/27629

You know, the problem with the "like XXX, except..." approach to game design is that you first have to re-implement XXX for whatever platform you have chosen. But it's slowly taking shape:

There is also a higher resolution video on the tubes: https://youtu.be/ALH6jTrM1Bc

The first day is over, and I have an almost playable game. The aliens, check. Advancing menacingly towards you, check. Shooting them, check. End game when all killed or when they reach you, check. A saucer at the top, check. Dropping bombs at you, check.

What's still missing: game over/you win screens, bombs killing you, multiple lifes, score, the actual mechanic that is novel (secret).

Finally you can die (in two different ways, no less!) and you can also win (by killing everything, of course). So it is officially a game now.

Unfortunately, my program code grew so big, that the tiny device doesn't have enough memory to parse it (it has a Python interpreter on board). There is a solution for this: parse it on the computer and upload the bytecode file. It makes the development a little more inconvenient, by adding the extra compilation and copying steps, but the game works.

Oh, before I thought about that, I removed the score from the game in an attempt to reduce code size. I don't like scores anyways, so I didn't put it back.

Now for the secret feature... I'm not so sure it's a good idea anymore, but let's try it anyways.

All this time I was focusing on the game and completely forgot about sound. I know that when playing such shooter games in silence, people have a tendency to make their own sounds, so to spare them embarrassment I have to add at least shooting and explosion sounds. No problem, that tiny metal thing on the right just below the screen is a speaker — I should be able to play wav files over it, I tested it before...

Except I didn't test it very well. Turns out that the speaker together with the amplifier somehow produce very bad sound — it's full of clicks and warbling. No idea why, but I suspect that I messed something up with the electronics. Oh well, too late to fix that now, here's a video of the finished game with sound: https://youtu.be/fCqvTueoG7I

Oh, and the secret sauce turned out to not change the game much.

You see, I very much liked the feature of the original Space Invaders that limited your rate of fire. It was not intentional, they simply could only display one missile at a time. So if you missed, your missile had to travel all the way to the top of the screen before you could shoot again. That is nice, because it encourages you to shoot carefully. So I thought "the more you have (missiles on the screen) the worse it is (as a weapon)". So the first missile you shoot has full power, but if you shoot another one while this one is still on the screen, it will be smaller, and the next one will be even smaller. Turns out that doesn't change the game much, and most players probably won't even notice it. Oh well.

You can always say "the more you have (aliens in a row) the worse it is (as they advance faster)", but that's a standard Space Invaders mechanic, so I guess not that interesting.

I'm still very happy that I made it, though.

This is my first game with sound for this platform, and I stupidly expected it will just work — turns out it didn't, I got a loud of click at the start of each sample, and annoying buzzing after the sample stopped playing. I figured this is a problem with the audio hardware of my homebrew console, and decided to fix it later.

Today I looked into those issues closer, without the deadline on my back, and found out that the problem was with the sound files. The clicks were there because the sample didn't start with a neutral value, and the buzzing was there because the file was truncated compared to the size specified in the header. Running the files through a conversion program fixed the problems.

But of course that is already after the deadline, so feel free to give me bad score for audio — I deserved this.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/vacuum-tube

So this is what I have so far. It's a cowboys versus mummies shooter, so far at least.

I was thinking about mixing game genres (Sokoban Tactics anyone?), but decided I wouldn't be able to finish that in time. Maybe next time. So instead I'm mixing the movie genres.

It's been a while since I made a game, we will see how this one goes. I always wanted to make a tactics game, in the style of Fire Emblem. And I wanted it to be steampunk-themed and have the player control golems. So here it goes.

I'm going to use PyGame, because I think it fits the kind of feel I'm aiming at and I like Python for programming. Details will follow.

Not sure how it will work in he end, but I decided to go for relatively large, hand-sketched graphics for now. I might switch to proper pixel art later on.

I have the basic standing and walking animations. Since the game is going to be turn-based, it would be very annoying to have to wait for an animation to finish, so the current animation is fast-forwarded automatically on a keypress — that's why you can see all that jumping around.

While working on my tactics game I realized that it Does Not Spark Joy, so I decided to scrap it and instead go with a plan B. Plan B is a Game With A Message, but not very much game play. On the other hand, it lets me to draw a lot of backgrounds, which I enjoy. It's more like an adventure game.

All the necessary mechanics is there. I hoped I could make more locations and with much more polished and artsy backgrounds, but I spent most of the day lying in bed sick, so I'm happy with what I've got.

I'm starting the work on packaging this now, and if I have time and energy left after that, maybe I will add some more content.

I'm done, and I have published all the files at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/gain

However, the EXE file I used (with python and pygame in it) was compiled a couple of years ago for win32, and I'm not 100% sure it will work. I would greatly appreciate if someone with a Windows box could test it.