My first participation with a LD competition. It will pretty much be a create-a-game-on-sunday for me, so that will be even more a challenge. Maybe I wont make it, maybe I will, I’ll see! I’m very excited to pick and work out an idea for the theme.

I’ll likely aim for Windows 7/Vista using 3D Gamestudio as it’s a great tool for quick prototyping. Maybe Android, or maybe even NintendoDS? (could add the emulator with the game). I’ll see what fits best to the idea and what is realistic to finish a game with.

Tooo the coffee machine!

Today, I made a plan and a bit of art and code. Hadn’t had much time today so not much progression, but still got all night and sunday to go!

The idea is to steer an evil force over the lands and convert it into an undead wasteland, where your minions suffer under your command, fed by the energy that flows from the putrefaction of dead organic lifeforms scattered about, released from their once free and happy lives they suffered from. Well, in my head it already looks cool.

1:30 AM for me, perhaps I should take a nap… but I’m scared of the dark…

The world is now generating fairly random, and I can easily expand it with more if I have time left. Patches of trees and areas of houses are randomly distributed over the screen within certain borders of my algorithm. I call create_areas(…), and give some information about how to distribute the areas over the screen, about how many, what spread, about how many objects per area, and which tile base to use (to show houses, or trees, or mountains, or tall grass…). It’s a nice function to work with.

Here’s a TODO list (with MoSCoW):

1. Create roads between houses within their area [W]
2. Draw the player [M] animate him [S] and make him able to move[M]
3. Draw art for the innocent surface dwellers [M] with animation [S]
4. Draw our evil minions [M] with animation [S]
5. Player can infest a creature/human to create a minion [M]
6. Battle system [M]
7. Battle behaviour for Minions [S], Humans[M] and Creatures [W]
8. Player can conquer an area (forest, village, …) to get bonus creatures [W]
9. Particlezzz! [W]

Phew… I don’t know… 22 hours left…

There are tiny creatures moving over my screen and I’m all out of wake. See you tomorrow, and good luck with the remaining hours everyone!

Littlebit bigger pic: http://www.joozey.nl/LudumDare/25/ThePlague/progress3.jpg

Seems like it’s common to write a post mortem here! This was my first LudumDare experience, I know nothing about this community, but I really like the spirit here. You go ludumdare community!

I had theoretically 24 hours, practically 12 hours to work on a game. Saturday afternoon I began sketching an idea in the train home, and shortly after arrival I began coding, line after line. Swearing the bugs away, one by one. Cutting the cool ideas away, implementing the more poor ones just to get SOMETHING finished before the deadline struck.

And there it is, The Plague. A game where your objective is to breed an army of minions as big as you can, and flood the entire land with disease (yes, the purple stuff).

What I did well:

• I really did finish a game within 12 hours!
• Came quickly and on time with alternative solutions for gameplay when I realised my original idea would take too much time.

My pixelart isn’t THAT bad, is it? 😀

• Animations in pixelart are pretty easy.
• I ran against the limitations of the middleware I use, but solved the problems with some creative solutions.

What could have been better:

• My inability to pick proper matching colours without fiddling for hours.
• Run short on time to implement algorithms to check any sort of winning conditions.
• Too few sounds, would have liked to add background music too. But I am far from a musician.

What I learned:

• I learned that sounds can do a LOT to your game.
• It’s hard to not make a sound become annoying due to repetition.
• I can trust my creativity when it comes to technical problem solving.

Now on to play some games from fellow developers! 😀

My dearest fellow gamedesigners!

Although the submission deadline has passed I haven’t left my project barely finished. It was still in a state where a continuation of development was possible (although the spaghetti-mess in the code seems to be increasing by a power of two with every additional feature), so I continued implementing what I had in mind but did not came around creating before submission deadline.

I took all your feedback in consideration, redesigned the visuals and implementing most of the suggestions, and here we are at version 0.2! So thank you for everyone who played my game during the voting weeks, and I hope you all enjoy this next release.

Features list:

• Two new minion types: shadow beasts and skeletons
• Three new enemies: pest doctors, villagers (they run away from you!) and wolves
• Zoomed in the view so the pixelart graphics are better visible on high resolution screens
• Press CTRL around a claimable area to assign your swarming minions to that area, and stand in the middle to recollect them
• Updated colours to match better (not my strongest point) and made some more graphical details

The most important feature not implemented: a winning condition :-). Just conquer all you can and create a large minion army!
Unfixed bug: claiming castles is often bugged, try to stand on the exact middle of the square that appears when pressing CTRL.

Kill any enemy to convert it into a minion. Some enemies are too strong, find the weaker ones first. Your minions by themselves are also quite weak, try to create a lot of them first and then swarm the villages.

I would gladly see more of your feedback!
Have fun playing.

Also, screenshot:

The Plague screenshot version 0.2 (update after the contest).

I’m in too with a great idea!This will be my second LD. Only got part of Saturday, but should be good to go the entire Sunday.
Too bad the compo starts in the middle of friday night for me, but I came up with an idea that works for a lot of themes so I took my head start today to compensate for saturday :D.

I’ll be using Java and Gimp this time.

Good luck everyone!

I knew I had only Sunday, so I did some prep. Now it’s time to get things rolling. ‘Multiplayer’ RTS Space Game in less than 48 hours! You Only Get One Chance To End The Universe >:)

Probably a bit too ambitious but eh! No Risk No Fun.

I originally had a whole different concept in mind, but it wasn’t feasible, nor fun. So I changed my gameplan from an RTS to an Action genre. I practically started working on it 4 hours ago, and I think I made some nice progress.

So far there is a universe to fly through and items to pick up! Now on to assembling the destructive device that will put an end to this crazy universe!

This is the second time I join a Ludum Dare competition. And the second time I spent a short day on it because my saturday was already taken by other obligations. Nevertheless I was able to submit something functional! Plus, I learned a whole deal in those 14 hours.

What went right
– Java! I hadn’t really made a full game before in pure Java (without any additional libraries), but it went rather well
– Using voice, that was a new one too. It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed implementing a bit of actual speech for the intro
-Some Java features I hadn’t had experience with, now for sure I do :). Mainly audio and Graphics2D
– I managed to keep my code fairly tidy. Of course, no comments at all and only at the end did my code go a tad messy, but overall I’m happy I kept the project nicely structured. It saved me some headdaches, I’m sure.

What went wrong
– I tried to stream to Twitch, but couldn’t get it to work on my Linux system
– Like my previous LD, I wasn’t able to make an actual ending. I should start earlier on such important things next time
– Kept pondering too long with a concept that was difficult to make, and even more difficult to make fun. K.I.S.S. applies here!
– Last minute failure to export… should have an emergency prototype out much earlier to ensure I can pubish my game at all

Really enjoyed this competition again. Back to life now, and I look forward for the next challenge. But first… I guess I’ll spend my time playing all your wonderful games :)!

-4 – 0 hours: setup workspace
0 – 8: sleep
8 – 9: in bed thinking of a game
9 – 12: setup game, work out main storyline and mechanic
12 – 16: specific features, bugfixing, tweaking
16 – 24: more features, more bugfixing, wind down, prepare sleep

Tomorrow: shapeshifting stories, sounds, levels and more.

THE RESULT:

Progress for today, tomorrow creating levels, story and sounds! #LD35 #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #1gam pic.twitter.com/1TUE41VYkM

— Jos van Egmond (@Joozey) April 16, 2016

I look back at this scrum board and think: could be worse :). Had to cut somewhere. I was already rushing the ending. So, the audio got dropped. Sadly.
But I’m super proud to actually have a finished story driven game from beginning to end with working game mechanics. Really surprised by how smooth the dev process went this time.

Went scrum style, with 4 ‘sprints’ of 8 hours. 16 hours of sleep (that was mandatory). Roughly: idea & setup, storyline & basic mechanics, detailed features (powerups, level loading), finishing story.

Streamed the whole process on twitch, was a new experience too. Had fun doing it. Mostly talking to myself, but that’s okay. Good verbal practice, and actually helps keeping focus. Definitely wont be the last time.

 
Would love to hear some feedback :).
Entry: Shapeshifters

Halfways the competition now, time to sleep, but not before I wrote down my progress. So far there is an introduction animation about Tiny Planet Corp, an industry corporation that sends out its Drill Bear employees to dig into tiny planets and extract the core crystal.

Ok, continuing tomorrow on the actual digging :).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMS7MBpEIE

I'm getting somewhere.

Yay! Finished my game. Had to scrap a lot of ideas as always, and just take the shortest route to the finish. But I did finish nevertheless with a playable game with intro and outro animation. I also managed to compose my own music using Linux Multimedia Studio, which is really cool! I'm happy with the result.

Sadly some performance issues in browser. Playing the Java .jar file works best, but not everybody knows how to run it.

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-planet-corp