When I first saw the theme, I had no clue what to do.  I recently got an idea, so I’m going ahead and making a last minute entry.  The name is called “Mood Fo Llaw”, and it is a side-scrolling shooter.  Here is a current screen shot:

As this is being made last minute, I won’t make any more posts until I’m done.

Tags: Mood Fo Llaw

Ok, I said I wouldn’t post progress, but I’m happy with my progress.  The clouds I put there in the very beginning, and it’s on my list of things to change.  Currently the game is playable, and I would say just a hour’s more work or so.  Major, major thanks to sfxr, as it was very easy to make the needed sounds, and it gave me a great moral boost as sounds made the game seem to have so much more progress.

Right now I’m going to go microwave some burritos, eat them up, and finish the game.

Tags: Mood Fo Llaw

After crunching, I’ve finally finished it.  I hope you enjoy playing at much as I have enjoyed making it!

Download Executable/Source: http://www.mediafire.com/?umlmwyhuzmw

Tags: final, Mood Fo Llaw

Thanks to xkcd for letting people steal his images for their own use as long as credit is given!

I’m entering for the second time.  I hope to use:

Python, because I’m too cheap to give Game Maker $20 for the full version.

Pyglet,  to handle windowing and media and otherwise everything that would send me back to game maker from being too scared to try myself.

Sfxr, for the sound.

Photoshop, came with my tablet, so I might as well use it for images.

ChronoLapse, for screen recording that doesn’t have a giant watermark saying something about not giving them money.

Milky Tracker, if I have enough time I’d like to try to make some basic music to spice up my game.

So yeah,  here it goes.

Part burrowing theme, part cavern theme is what my entry will be. The character (probably going to be named Jimmy) fell down a dry well. Convieniently, he happened to have a pickax. found a hole in the ground and brought a pickax for an adventure. He starts digging away at the walls of the cavern to see what he will find. I hope to have a game where you can take different approaches. There on one hand is the ability to dig around and see what you find in the world of underground. I also hope to add some building mechanic beyond carving away at the rock so that you can start a little house underground.

Thanks to http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/JapanProj//FLClipart/ for the image. This counts as non-profit educational, right?

Just woke up, so now it’s time to get making away at My Little Cavern. This is the start for the art that I did last night. I need to do more, but I think it’s a good start. No game working yet, but it should be soon.

Art start

Tags: motivation

Collision, it rocks

I’ve been up to allot since the last post.  I barely had the code started, and I got windows and moving around working well.  After wasting a ton of time working on walls only to realize that the way I wanted to do them would infact take forever to do with all the different possibilities to consider.  After giving up on that for simpler walls, and failing at one attempt to do collision I was somewhat discouraged, but after a quick walk around the block, I was back at it.  I got collision working well now, and with all the basics set up,  I can finally start focusing on actual game play.

I’d also like to note that this is the first time I’ve gotten this far with a game basically ever.  I’ve known how to do it, but haven’t taken the time much, and have had to do a bunch of documentation reading (ug) to get the basics working.

After collision got working (last post) I implimented digging, and it works great animations and all.  After I got digging as done as it’ll get, I tried tackling cavern generation…and ended up with laggy strait tunnel generation.  This was another bummer because I spent so much time working on it trying to figure out a good algorythm, but it failed in the end.  I got a tiny bit a spriting done, and now I’ve turned off the screen recorder for the night and am not going to work on it anymore at the moment.  I’m going to sleep on the algorythm, and hope tomorrow will bring better luck with my not waisting my time with failedattempts.

Lets see, I got on the computer at what, 10:30 ish, and now it is 3:12. (should have waited two minuets to write this.)  After much coding, I finally have cavern generation working.  Every cavern you’ll see is generated by the game from scratch including the first cavern you start in.  While you play the game will seamlessly generate the next cavern in the background.  It will then place it on chance with coming in at a random point on the direction your mining, and if the space it wants to be placed in is open.  What’s left is to do a tiny bit of finishing up on cavern generation including adding things like stalagmites and mushrooms to make the caverns more interesting.  Then I will hopefully get some music made that will play in the background.  After that I want to add a goal to the game (collect as many mushrooms as you can?) and some other goodies that will make it fun to play.

After much work, my entry is finally finished.  Little Jimmy roams around in his cavern collecting points and mining away.

Arrow keys to move, z to mine. Explore the cave to gain points. A mining a wall gets 1 point, a stalagmite 10 points, and finding a mushroom gives 100. If you mine out of the room, you should find another cavern, continue to find more and more caverns, racking up the points. I had allot of fun making this entry, procedurally generated caverns and all, so I hope you have some fun playing it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=530

Edit: View the timelapse here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNTvw0nG8o4

Tags: timelapse

Theme turned out to be one of the two I had a theme for (the other being having a game about Fandom of LoZ: Twilight Princess.)  The general idea is that the player will control a submarine, which explores a shipwreck in hopes of coming out with grand treasure.

I plan on using:

Unity with Javascript – Um….. I’ll consider this a crash course.

3D studio max – if these weird graphical errors stop

sfxr – because nothing else can make sounds quite like it

Photoshop – if I by chance decide to make some textures

Progress is going well.  I have movement, lighting, and some early sound all working well.

Controls instructions and playable after the jump.

The controls are:

W and S- Forward and Backward

A / S- Tip counter-clockwise / Clockwise

Directional keys – turn and look

[WP_UnityObject src=”http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3472941/ocean.unity3d” width=”560″ height=”420″/]

Well, it’s coming along.  I have treasure and some other small things working.  Now all I need to do is make a few other kinds of treasure, put them in the game, finish the ship, and hopefully add some more sounds.  A current screenshot, and playable after more.

W/S – Forward/Backward

A/D – spin couter-clockwise/ clockwise

directional keys – Look and turn

Go forward to find the start of the ship.  A box that can be nocked around and a tophat that can be collected are on the top of the ship.

[WP_UnityObject src=”http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3472941/ocean_02.unity3d” width=”560″ height=”420″/]

Well, this Ludum Dare wasn’t that good for me.  The biggest problems are that I don’t have any skill in 3d modeling, I’m not used to unity yet,  and that I didn’t dedicate much of my weekend to making anything worth while.  This screen shot is old, but little has changed in the place it was taken since it was taken, so it’s all good.  A playable and explanation of what to do is available after the more.

Controls are:

W/S – Forward / Backward

A/D – Spin counter-clockwise/clockwise

Directional Keys – Turn and look

Go forward and the ship will come into view.  There are five treasures hidden around the ship, try to get them before air runs out.  Good luck.

[WP_UnityObject src=”http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3472941/ocean_04.unity3d” width=”560″ height=”420″/]

I figured I’d make a fancy chart of the results from each round of voting this time around, for the fun of it.  After trying a few different types of charts, it seems that this method gave the most information.  Hope you enjoy!

The chart in google docs.

If you have any requests for different types of charts to display the info, feel free to suggest and I’ll see what I can do.

Tags: stats

Redundancy; Quick, everybody do this:

Redundancy; Quick, everybody do this:

Here are stats from round three:

The chart is viewable in google docs here.  (this file includes round one and two voting stats and charts)

Check http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/tag/stats/ for all statistics related posts!

Tags: stats

I’m not used to the early start time at all.  Anywho, my declaration of entry:

Using

-Python

-Pyglet

-Aviary’s online tools (for sound and graphics)

-Some form of SFXer

-Possibly photoshop

Lets get this party started!

So.  Well….

I’m not sure how this weekend will work out.  I may end up with not a lot of time to work on the LD, but I hope I do have the time.  The current idea of what I plan on working with:

Python for the language

Pyglet for the windowing and media

Some version of SFXr for sound

Photoshop or paint.net for art

The last few LDs I’ve slacked off on being a good participant, maybe this time I’ll be a bit better and go for a winner 😀

A few of us from the ACM club at the University of Minnesota Duluth are going to be gathering to participate in the next Ludum Dare.  If you are in the area and would like to join us, contact me at Laremere@gmail.com or post a comment below with a way to contact you.