Planet thing is done. Or not done, it’s actually so incomplete that it doesn’t even have a name. But you can download it and “discover” new planets. It’s kind of amusing and the results are sometimes pretty good (but often terrible).

I might try to turn this into a real game or sfxr-for-landscapes tool or something.  And send me the names of any cool landscapes you discover via twitter (@joeld42) or email.

It’s been fun!

Link to the program (please comment if you try it, even though it’s not elegible for voting).

Allright, so I am definitely in. My basecode and code from previous LD48’s can be found here: ld48jovoc , and as usual I’ll be checking in my work in progress as I go. I’ve also started to make a nice, cleaned up version of my basecode here: Luddite Engine , unfortunately I haven’t got very far so there’s not much there yet. Not sure how much of that I’ll use vs. just starting from scratch.

Also, this will be my first LudumDare on MacOS. But all my code is SDL-based so I should be able to release out a windows build as well. I’m trying to move all my art and development to mac now but there’s a few little tools I’m still clinging to on windows.

• Code: C++
• Image editing: Photoshop, al.che.my
• 3D stuff: Blender, Pixexix for texture painting (it’s awesome)
• Sound & Music: garageband, all kinds of iPad and guitar crap
• Voxel Editing: sproxel

Wait, what? Voxel editing? Well.. a friend of mine at work showed me a little side project he was working on, inspired by stuff like Voxatron and Fez:

Sproxel is a voxel editor for making sprite-like graphics. It’s totally incomplete and barely usable, but I convinced him to release it so I could use it for this LD48. Those little blocky things are totally fun. I don’t know why I keep making birds though. Some kind of buried subconscious stuff. Those pics at the bottom are renders out of blender, I made a dumb little script that just makes cubes from the sproxel file.

If you’re brave (or stupid) enough to want to try it, you can get it here: Sproxel Editor for Mac and Win32. It also builds easily for linux. The “file format” is a simple text file that is pretty easy to parse. (Update: there’s some minimal docs now!)

I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to use this or not. It really depends on the theme and the idea. I’ve got absolutely zero voxel rendering code ready so whatever I do will have to be pretty simple. But they just look so tasty it’s hard to resist.

Anyways.. see you all this weekend. From the huge number of votes and posts so far, it looks like this one is going to be absolutely insane.

Update2: There’s a windows build now!

Well, it’s off to a slow start, but I can render a chunk of voxels.

That’s supposed to be a shrubbery.

I’ve still got a long way to go…

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 7:35 am and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

Starting to look rather zeldish…

My rendering strategy is “punish the gfx card” as you can see by the wireframe.

Hopefull it will be playable soon

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 4:55 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

After a slight roadblock because I didn’t test my “new” font code as well as I thought I did, I got more gameplay basics in there.

And also there are enemies. And they can hurt you. Woo. But there’s still no way to fight back. And only one map screen. And I’m starting to fall asleep.

Gonna be a busy day tomorrow if I am to finish this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 11:51 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

So I tried to add a first-person mode. It’s cool as hell but still pretty buggy and there’s still tons of gameplay left to do, so I’m going to drop it, but leave it in as an option (press F). In the original plan, the overworld was going to be first person and the caves and dungeons would be overhead.

And now, here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. The obligatory sword cave:

I still have a ton of code left — you can’t actually use the sword yet for example. And more map rooms. I’m not sure if it will be quite finished by the deadline but we’ll see how far I can get.

These voxels are pretty fun, tho.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2011 at 4:04 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

I think this is my most complete LD48 game ever. That’s not saying much, though. There’s about one or two minutes of gameplay, but you can actually win or lose and run around and fight stuff and other game-like stuff.

Press ‘F’ to try the secret, not-really-working FPS mode.

I had some trouble with the mac build. It should work, but you need a 64 bit mac, and you probably need SDL installed, and it has to be run from the terminal because it expects you to be in the game directory to load it’s voxely sprites.

I’ll try and figure out how to bundle it up as a proper app. I’ll also make win32 and linux builds, but those might have to wait until tomorrow. Now, I’m going to take a break for a few hours, and have some dinner.

Go to my entry page for the download links.

I’ve got a working bundle for Mac (64-bit), and builds for win32 and linux up now. In addition, there’s a source pkg with a standalone cmake file which should build easily on all platforms if you want to compile it yourself.

I finally got around to making a little walkthrough of my LD20 entry. So if you had trouble running it or didn’t want to download it, or are just stumped by the staggeringly complexity of the puzzles, then check it out:

Also includes a quick looks at the “Sproxel” voxel editor I used to make the characters and tiles.

Will there be a post-compo version? We’ll see…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 at 4:12 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

Wow, PoV thinks I’m awesome! That’s quite an honor.

But sadly, I will not be awesome this weekend. I’ll miss this one because we’re in crunch time at my new job at Smule, making interactive music thinngys for iDevices.  In the tradition of the contest, here’s a pic of my workspace at the office:

Sorta atypical office equipment. But I’ll definitely following the LD48 action, and coding into the night with y’all, just not on a LD48 entry this time. I might even try to get on IRC if I don’t get too distracted by it. Maybe I’ll try a minigame if I can spare a few hours but we’ll see, anyways I’ll do a mini-LD soon to make up for it.

Good luck to everyone! and vote for FISHING! (I don’t even know if that’s one of the topics, I just want to play a lot of fishing games).

So I’m in for real this time. Going to do a team entry with a buddy of mine doing art stuff, so I’ll be doing the Jam this time.

(Click the screenshot for a video, I couldn’t figure out how to embed it directly)

We decided to do a little warm-up today. I’m thinking about using cocos2d and I wanted to try it out before the contest. This is the result, far from complete but not too shabby considering we started at 2pm, a mere 11 hours ago.

Looking forward to the jam!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2011 at 2:06 am and is filed under LD #22. 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.

I’m all in this weekend. I have (mostly) cleared my calendar, and I’m ready to go.

Doing something a little different this time, I’m going to do the Jam with an artist friend of mine, NinjaFartOfDoom (I can only assume he meant to type “NinjaOfArt” eh?) and were going to see what happens.

Tools: Depending on the theme and idea, we’ll either use Cocos2D or my basecode (which is getting a bit crufty).

jovoc

It took me forever to figure out an idea for this.

But I’m going with something (hopefully) simple. “The Last Dinosaur”. You are the last dinosaur and must run to try and escape extinction. Yep, it’s going to be a side-runner but with a hopefully interesting twist.

Also, my game artist friend is going to be helping out tomorrow so this placeholder art is actually placeholder for once…

Wow! I can’t believe how much I’ve got done after the first day. Using an engine (cocos2d) is really paying off. Also the game looks really adorable because i have a real artist helping out.

“Aloneasaurus”

I’ve got the basic game mechanic working — he runs, but instead of making him jump you slide the earth up and down to make him jump or fall on the platforms. That’s right, you are Plate Tectonics! Still needs tons of tuning and content but it’s already fun to play.

Woo! And that was LD22! This was the first time I did the Jam purposefully rather than just using it as a time extension for the contest, and it turned out great. Having an artist to work with was a real privilege.

It’s an iPhone game, so I can’t really upload a binary. What I’m going to do is submit it to Apple later tonight and post a video of the gameplay.

Check out the video! (sorry the first few seconds are messed up). If it’s not clear from the video you control the dinosaur indirectly by sliding the platforms up and down.

As soon as the app is approved by Apple, I’ll put up a link to the app store and so everyone can play and comment on it. I’ll keep the app free for the duration of the judging and feedback time, I might release a post-compo version later.

Anyways! This was a lot of fun and I think this is my most polished LD entry yet.

Link to the Entry Page (I will add the App Store link here when apple approves it)

UPDATE 11:45pm – Submitted to App Store! Will update when available. Email me if you would like to try a build early thru TestFlight.

All right! Our LD22 Jam Entry Aloneasaurus is live in the app store, just minutes before the holiday shutdown.

Go get it, it’s a free download on the app store and try it out! Ratings and comments are much appreciated, both here and in itunes. Thanks!

Aloneasaurus in the App Store

Thoughts and planning already underway for a post-compo version with better tuned gameplay.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 at 7:58 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.

Well, I’ve got a busy weekend,but I don’t think I can miss the 10th anniversary. I’ve been doing ludumdare since the beginning (well, not counting LD0).  My basecode and previous entries which I will probably cannibalize can be found at the usual place.

It looks like I’ll probably only have one full day, Sunday, and it will be a short one at that since the compo ends. So I’ll try to keep it simple. Also, I’m going to make it 3d. (See what I did there?)

Good luck everyone.

Jovoc

I am in! Pretty sure I’ll get an uninterrupted 48 hours this time so I’m really excited about this. I figured it was time to update my montage of past entries.

Yeah, so I’ve been doing these for a while. I’m pretty sure I’ll stick to good old C++/OpenGL/SDL but there’s a chance I’ll use cocos-2d or cocos-2d-x if I come up with a 2D game. I’ve started on a real for-serious game engine but it’s not quite ready even for ludumdare usage yet, hopefully it will be ready for the next one. So I’ll probably once again use bits and pieces from my old entries for a basecode. I’ve got some new musical toys so hopefully I’ll find time to add some music for this one.  For graphics I use photoshop and blender.

Good luck everyone! This is going to be awesome!

Tags: montage

My engine is in shambles right now, so I threw together a bunch of junk from my old entries into something resembling a basecode. It’s not much more than just a mainloop and loaders for textures and shaders, and some font code, but that’s more than I usually start with so maybe I won’t spend the first few hours trying to draw a cube (ahh, c++, how I love/hate it).

I was hoping to get mesh loading in there too, but I ran out of time so I guess I’ll either do that during the contest or just do everything procedurally or use cubes for everything (I did that for one of my favorite entries once). If you’re curious, the code is in my ld48jovoc code dump, under the “minibasecode” and “ld_template” directories. Feel free to scavenge, but it’s kind of a mess, especially if you’re not used to using cmake and xcode together. Hopefully this should enable me to build windows and linux versions very quickly after the contest, it’s worked out pretty well in the past.

I also added a little template script that sets up a new project that links in the basecode and has a mostly empty game class (that’s the screenshot you see above). So that should save me some setup, too.

Can’t wait for the theme and can’t wait to get started.

All right, so my idea this time is going to be “Word Evolution”. I did a word game for LD13 and that turned out pretty good even through I didn’t quite finish, so I’m going to try that again. I’m sure you’ve seen those little word puzzles where you have to take one word like DUCK and change it to another like HORN by changing one letter at a time e.g. DUCK, DOCK, MOCK,MORK,MORN,HORN.  But also I’m going to allow adding letters.

In my game a word will be the genome of a creature. Each word will generate a unique creature, and similar words will generate similar creatures. Adding letters will extend the genome and make more complicated creatures. I haven’t worked out 100 how the creature generation will work but I have some ideas.

I am going to start with just getting the simple word game part fun and reasonable balanced, and then tackle the harder (and more fun) problem of creature generation. Hopefully I’ll get to that later today or I’ll have no chance of finishing. Right now my prototype just has a placeholder creature and a textual description of what will eventually be awesome evolved creatures.

Anyways, I’m really enjoying this theme. Looks like a lot of unique entries, tons of variety. I can’t wait to play some of these entries.