As I didn’t want to spend the entire competition playing through the LD archives, I picked three previous themes and used all of them.  I hope that by doing this, I came close enough to two things in there that it qualifies.  The three themes that I worked from were:

• Construction/Destruction
• Chain Reaction
• The Tower

You’re trying to build your tower into the green area at the top of the screen before your opponent builds theirs into the red area.  The arrow keys move the building blocks around the top of the screen, rotate them, and drop them, much like Tetris.  If you don’t build your tower sturdily, then some of your tower may crumble due to the extra weight you’re adding as you build.  If you notice your opponent building his tower sloppily, you can drop a few blocks on his tower to collapse his and give you a lead.

Pygame source code can be downloaded from http://github.com/kd5bjo/tower-wars/downloads .  The game can be run single-player (no opponent) with ‘python towerwars.py’.  The ‘–help’ option will tell you what you need to know to play multi-player.

I have not tested this on any platform other than Linux, and I have not tested the multiplayer over the Internet.  It shouldn’t be hard to make it work under Windows, but I don’t have access to a Windows machine to test on.

Tags: final, mini, tower wars

My entry for Mini-LD 16: Constraints.  I’d appreciate any comments you might have, as well as what scores you end up getting.

Click on the image above to play.

Unfortunately, the graphics don’t really make a complete set.  I think they came out decently for my first time, though.  They were all produced by rotoscoping photographs that I found online.

Cow in Biplane

Download here

Tags: blind date gfx

18 hours in, and all I have to show for it are some icons (and a design document, not pictured):

Fortunately, this covers most of the graphics in my game, so now it’s time to dive into actual development. I’m planning an economic simulator, and these are the different resource types that you have to deal with.

My deadline is 21:00 PST tomorrow.

Tags: journal

I’m going to be working through Ian Schrieber’s online Game Design course over the next few months.  If anyone here is interested in going through it with me, please come visit my game design blog

Tags: Shameless Plug

I finished porting Greedy Towlr to webkit- and mozilla-based browsers.  The entry page is http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-20/?action=preview&uid=687

I’ll be participating in LD this weekend; I’ll be ripping out all of the game code from my MiniLD 20 entry and using what’s left as my framework.

… and all my ideas are starting to come together into mush.  I guess it’s time for me to let them rise overnight, so that when I bake them in the morning I get a fresh, tasty game.

My game has all of the really important elements, and I’m pleased with my progress thus far.  Though it’s designed for iPad / iPhone, it should work on all Webkit and Mozilla browsers as well.

Todo list for tomorrow (in no particular order):

• Splash screen
• Better player movement
• Score
• Difficulty progression
• General funness
• Sound
• Detecting end of game
• High-score list
• More enemy types
• Some way to dispatch with the last enemy
• Background image
• Graphics for player
• Explosions on bullet impact

If any of you find any bugs, please let me know.  Any thoughts you have about what might make it better would also be appreciated.

I’ve posted a postmortem of Dodger, my Ludum Dare 18 entry on my blog.