This will be my first Ludum Dare and I just hope that something comes out at the other side. My tools are:

• Löve
• Hump + HardonCollider
• Pixen
• LFXR/Supercollider/Milkytracker

Since my last entry in LD 48 was such a nice experience I want to give this one a shot. I’ll be using the same tools as last time:

• LÖVE
• Gimp
• Audacity
• Supercollider
• Pixen
• BFXR
• HUMP

Assembling my tools and looking forward to the weekend. I will use the following:

• Löve (http://www.love2d.org)
• hump (https://github.com/vrld/hump)
• advancedtiledmaploader (https://github.com/Kadoba/Advanced-Tiled-Loader)
• hardoncollider (https://github.com/vrld/HardonCollider)
• Pixen/Photoshop with Wacom thingy
• Supercollider/luaAV/Logic/LMMS/Fruity for music

As always: finishing a game is my most important goal. Good luck, everyone.

The plan is to make a Zelda/MagicTheGathering-mashup game. My sidequest: use gameboy palette und resolution.

It is done. (Not really. Bugs. Bugs, everywhere. I’ll probably make a improved jam version of it). Making gameboy graphics was so much fun.

After the more or less successful LD20, LD21 and LD22 I hope to have some fun at this special edition

I’m using Haxe + HaxeFlixel + Pyxeldit + FLStudio + SuperCollider + some kind of mapeditor(probably ogmo?) with Löve as a backup  if all else fails.

Despite the collision with the guild wars launch, I will start in LD 24 using löve.

My codebase is on github and I describe it in detail on my blog.

I will use FLStudio/Supercollider for music and sound, Pixen for pixelin and VIM/Textmate for coding.

Disregard the kongregate drama and have a great time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012 at 3:29 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Another exhausting 48 hour compo done, another game complete and I can still feel the repercussions. But is was a great weekend! And this time my game has a lot less bugs compared to my LD 23 entry.

This game is sort of a round based tactical/strategic game. The idea was advance wars with dinosaurs, but in a reduced kind of way. Well, see for your self:

To The Game

There’s also a patched up Post-Compo/Jam version in there. I will start to write a post mortem as soon as my head isn’t filled with pudding anymore.

Philosoraptor

Evolution for me was the worst choice of all possible themes. The problem was that I thought of evolution as a linear progressing system with no real conflict. But what drives evolution is always competition between parts of system. The reason for evolution isn’t adaptation. Adaptation it is the outcome of the process. The evolving creatures are not aware of the fact, that they are adapting themselves to be fitter in the competition. I thought that it would be interesting to turn this concept upsidedown: so I created advance wars with dinosaurs.

Dinos and Eggs

The game is a turn based strategy/tactical game where the goal is to eliminate all opponents. You move the dino around on a tiled and grid fixed map. When you a dinosaur breaks an egg, it evolves.

Jurassic Crunch

Ludum Dare is always exciting but this time I went deep down the rabbit hole. Even though the produced code is not in any way ‘good’, the whole time I felt in control of what I am doing. Normally when the crunch at the end of day 2 sets in my code quality suffers and due to concentration problems it takes a lot more time to debug stuff. Not this time. Because the idea was quite simple I had enough time for some debugging in the end. That made the game a lot better(=less embarrassing bugs) than my previous entries.

Pixel Rex

Pixelart and retro snes music are always fun to make but I hope to try out other art styles(maybe a bit more ‘serious’ and less cute) in a future LD. However, I had no big problems making them. My trusted set of tools – Pixen for art and FLStudio+Supercollider for music, did not let me down. As a more code oriented guy in real life it is always great to dive in this side of the gamedev process

Conclusion and Future

I am still working on this game and a bugfixed version with added mouse(!) controls is available here. I tried(and still try) to improve everything that was criticized by you guys. I am also planning some boss fight, different levels and more stuff for the future to make this a more complete game.

I hope the fun I had developing translates at least a bit into the experience of playing. Let me know what you think. Have fun testing this little game!

Ludum Dare? Yes! In again after completing LD 20,21,22,23 and 24, I can not wait to get started on LD 25. I had a lot of fun the last time with the development of Evolwar, which was a turn based strategy/tactics game. The game also got some good review which made me even more happy. I hope this LD is going to be the same fun as the last.

My Tools:

• Löve (whats that? only the best 2D framework ever!)
• my boilerplate code (actually a lot of it is stolen from other people, so thanks to vrld, kikito and so)
• Pixen, make me some pixels
• FL + SuperCollider + Audacity, unusual combo, but it works

I wish you all good luck and I hope you make your best game yet

You have to become the villain.

Another great weekend full of designing, coding, pixeling and composing is over. LD 25 for me was a good edition because I finished my game in time and it seems to be my best yet.

Play and rate the game

Dream Chamber is a very basic tboi/zelda-like dungeon crawler with procedural maps featuring ranged combat. Collect sleeping pills to get your fire rate up and hearts to get your life up. It progressively gets harder the deeper you get.

What went right?

Well, the second day was really really productive. I did write most of the code on the second day and the gameplay got better and better. But the first day was kind of a mess because I really couldn’t decide what to do with the theme. At first I wanted to make a puzzle game which involved solving levels by swapping your place with the villain(as in ‘you have to become the villain’). But I somehow did not like that so I decided to go for this room style procedural generated maps.

What went wrong?

The description of the game on the LD Site says: “You are a dream thief. Fight incubi and nightmares on your way deep down into the dream chamber…“. I wanted to bring this out more in the game but there was no time really. So I decided against it and kept the reference to the LD25 theme sort of loose. That’s not very satisfying but I had to make this cut in order to get this game to a playable/stable version in one day. In the future I hope to make LD games that have more to do with the actual theme.

What will happen?

Right now I’m still pumped from the weekend and I really would like to continue the work on this and make a deluxe version. But I don’t want this to be a stupid Binding of Isaac Clone –  we will see what happens if my endorphin rush decays and real life settles back in. I enjoy the concept of these particular types of zelda-likes so maybe maybe my ‘commercial’ game is going to be like this. Who knows.

I might use Löve, or javascript/canvas or maybe qbasic depending on the theme.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at 9:54 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

What a weekend.

Day 2 was great.  Now I just hope that I don’t find any bugs later on…had to reupload more than three times because I kept finding stupid mistakes. Well, I’m off to bed! Keep it up.

Back for the 8th time. No time, let’s cut to the chase:

• Löve (http://www.love2d.org)
• my codebase: https://github.com/headchant/love-boilerplate
• if I have problems(…collision detection/response…), I will throw libraries at it
• Sublime / Textmate / Vim
• Music: FLStudio / Supercollider / BFXR
• Sprites: PFXR / Pixen

Or I’ll just make a boardgame…

I wish everyone a fun weekend

Hello everybody, I will join the ludum dare compo once again! It is my 9th time, I believe. I will use

• Löve
• My Boilerplate
• Sublime Text / Vim
• Pixen / Pickle
• FLStudio + Supercollider
• tons of Haribo

There is a list of ideas for the first voting round over at my blog. I’m excited, let’s do this!

The end of rating is ‘nigh and I feel the urge to put together my thoughts on the last ludum dare.

Play the game.

The theme

As usual I tried to stay away from the obvious interpretations of the theme. I had the strong desire to make something in the platformer/action area and decided on the theme ‘you only get juan': a mexican princess gets married against her will – everytime you try to break out of this arranged marriage your father says: “you only get juan” with juan being you future husband.

The story was cut out in the end and during development I found out that all the underlying Ideas were centered around the mario games. Inversed roles of the princess and mario, a corrupted mario, a redux version of mario: all of this has been done before. I looked at pictures of the first mario level  from super mario bros on vgmaps and really wondered how a world could be expanded. Especially if there was some kind of underworld beneath 1-1. In the end I decided to expand on that idea and turned the game into what it is now: A deeper and darker exploration of the first super mario bros level and the life and death of game characters. “You only get 1-1″.

What went right

As complicated as the design process was, I think in the end it turned out all right. Level design was my major concern and level design in this case involved a lot of testing. Luckily I had some local people who helped and made some great suggestions. People are great
I am at a point right now that I can really work fast with Lua and the Löve framework. I have some good workflows and patterns in place. My code in (generally) structured and stays readible for me.
Implementing plattforming physics is always ‘fun’ and a bit tedious but this time I think I nailed it: no major bugs like in some former LDs.

What went wrong

There is some code that I really want to tidy up and I think I still have some design issues.

First of all there is a coingate which only lets you through to the last part of the level, which is the replay of the first part. You have to have a specified amount of coins so that the gate opens. I played around with different values but decided to reduce the coins in the end. The gate was built because I wanted to encourage exploration and discourage speed runs. But for LD game it you also should be able to play through most of the game in 10-15 minutes, so I lowered that. In the end the value was a bit too low, as most players didn’t felt that there was a barrier here.

The code had some major delta time issues, especially on slower machines, so that in the end I decided to give upper values to delta time to still get predictable and expected behaviour of the collision detection. I’m really tired of things falling through grounds

Media

I made a walkthrough of the game which covers most (but I think not all) of it.

You can also find the music track from the title screen on soundcloud:

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to try my game.

It’s very much a broughlike but it seems to be fun.

On Sunday I will add more abilities, online highscores and fancy cutscene graphics.

Hi. My name is headchant and I made Annex Kharon for Ludum Dare 30. It is a weird roguelike with spaceships about connecting planets to a trade network and is very much inspired by games like 868-HACK or Hoplite.

Spaceships in space!

>>>Play It Here<<<

I don’t want to write a full blown postmortem so I will keep it simple:

What went right?

Had a lot of fun making this one. I tried to focus on something simple and after a couple of revisions the gameplay. I think I did manage my time quite well this time: A whole mock of the game was finished after day one. The second day was used to polish it and fix all little bugs.

What went wrong?

The first sketch used asian ascii symbols but I wasn’t quite happy with the looks so I used PFXR as inspiration for the ships. But I sadly didn’t have time to draw nicer ships. Connecting planets was a nice simple idea but I have the feeling that I could have used it more especially for the abilities. I also didn’t have time to make more abilities.

Conclusion

I am did some minor fixes and alteration to the game for the post-compo version but I don’t think that ever will make a big game out of it. As said earlier: I had a lot of fun making it and that is the most important for ludum dare.