Here’s a screenshot of my game so far:
I’ve got particle systems, collision detection, and a really big map! I started with just LOVE so I had to lay a lot of foundation. Hopefully I’ll start filling in the gaps and have it look like a real game soon.
Follow the project (and me) on github: https://github.com/leafo/ludum-dare-22
Tags: progress
Going to bed now. Today I drew graphics, added enemies, bullets, backgrounds, and particle effects. Still lacking a ton of graphics and absolutely no audio yet. Tomorrow I will finally be able to make an actual game. (I HOPE!)
Finally came up with a title for my game, and I drew the title screen. Now if I can just finish it!
Although I finished this yesterday at the deadline, I’m posting it now because the site isn’t (as) super laggy.
Proudly presenting Volcanox:
Volcanox is platformer that takes place on a distant planet, coded entirely in my own programming language. Our hero is stranded alone with a volcano in his path, and he must find a way out! There’s only one level and enemy, but it’s a fairly long level and the enemies are annoyingly hard. So plenty of replay value. There is an end for those brave enough to get there. It also times you, so you can share results with your friends.
I put up a small homepage for the game as well, so it’s not lost in this blog.
Windows:
Extract and run the executable: volcanox.zip
Other Platforms:
Install the LÖVE game engine as directed on their site. Download the .love file, and open it with the game engine.
The source is hosted on GitHub.
After speaking to some Windows players (after the deadline) I’ve found out that some of them have a problem with moving, where one direction is faster than the other. I also have heard of an issue where the sound effects break after playing initially. I was unable to reproduce any of these problems on my development machine (linux) so my apologies to those who encounter these problems during their playthrough.
Tags: final, finished, Love, LÖVE-PARTY, love2d, screenshot
Volcanox was a lot of fun for me. Although a programmer, game development is not something I normally do. Additionally, it was also a test of the programming language MoonScript. I wanted to see if I could write a game in my own programming language.
The results, I thought, were pretty good. By the end of the competition I had something playable. I even had time to write music and insert sound effects.
If you haven’t played the game yet, you can do so here!
For this project I started with plain LÖVE. I figured I could get a foundation together. Even before the theme was announced I was pretty certain of making a platformer. It’s something I’ve never done before but I implementation ideas in my head. The first night was all writing collision detection code and movement. This was the one thing I was certain about writing, so I plowed through it. I even had time to write a map loader
I implemented an algorithm called Uniform Hash Grid, which let me subdivide my collidable objects to reduce the number of checks per frame. This worked very well, I was able to create a huge map with no impact to runtime performance. (It had a little load time though, which I think I could improve if I had more time.)
My map loader just loaded a bitmap where pixels represented collidable tiles. I did this to avoid having to use any real map editor tool. In my code I assigned colors from the map image to be actual tile sprites. This was my first map:
From there I just added gravity, and assigned a jump button and I had a working platformer.
I spent some time fooling around with ideas. I wrote a basic particle system which I later used for all the shooting effects.
The next day, after waking up I decided to tackle something I thought would be very hard, drawing sprites. I put together a simple (and awful) animated player sprite:
After that though I kind of lost sight of what I wanted to create. I had a working system, but I didn’t know what kind of game to create. I got lazy and went out to a coffee shop with friends. I think this was unavoidable because I needed time to think. After that I decided I would have shooting and enemies so I started coding bullets. I added minor things and created a tile set. Things were looking okay but I still didn’t have a game mechanic.
On the last day the name Volcanox finally came to me. I coded up until 1 hour before the deadline adding simple game features like title screen, and winning and losing conditions. I added one enemy and wrote the AI. I had no experience writing something like that so it came out very unnatural. I decided that because the game was so simple, I would make the enemy spawning very aggressive. This actually made the game (annoyingly) hard. I expanded the map to make it huge and have lots of enemy spawners.
Here’s the final map: (yes that’s a volcano)
The last hour I rebooted into OSX and recorded some music on my keyboard, and quickly got some sound effects out of bfxr. I submitted my game at exactly 6pm.
The final submission’s source code is on GitHub.
Part of this project for me was testing how well MoonScript would work for game development. MoonScript is a language that compiles into Lua. It’s a slimmed down syntax that adds a lot of sugar. Things like classes, list comprehensions, and a lot of other useful stuff. It works great with LOVE.
I wrote 1534 lines of MoonScript, and it compiled into 2880 lines of Lua. Pretty cool!
I heavily used the class system, and the inheritance it provides. It allowed me to quickly scaffold objects in my game. I think if I were writing Lua, a lot of time would be spent designing my object interaction. In that regard, MoonScript was an excellent tool to use.
I strongly recommend it for game development.
Once again, If you haven’t played the game yet you can do so here!
Tags: lua, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, tools
Hello everyone!
I’m back for my second Ludum Dare and I couldn’t be more excited. I learned a lot last time, finishing my first game called Volcanox. It was a great experiment for me because I wrote the game in my own programming language, MoonScript.
It was also very difficult because I was essentially started with nothing more than love2d. I spent a lot of time writing all of the game foundations from scratch. This time around I’m coming prepared. I extracted all the generic things I wrote for Volcanox (like collision detection, and rendering tiles) into a little library called LoveKit.
I’ve also got a few more tricks up my sleeve with LoveKit. I’ve written a nifty piece of code to hot-load game code and images as I edit them. This means that as soon as I save some file the changes are instantly reflected in the game without having to restart anything. I haven’t use this to make a game yet, but I think it will speed thing up considerably, I’ll post an update about how well it’s working once the comp has started.
Follow me on twitter as I post updates!
Language: MoonScript (compiles to Lua)
Editor: gvim
Framework: LÖVE
Library: LoveKit
Graphics: GIMP
Music: JV-1010 and Loop Station RC-3
Sounds: as3sfxr and Audacity
Tags: love2d, moonscript
Although I finished this yesterday at the deadline, I’m posting it now because the site isn’t (as) super laggy.
Proudly presenting Wulcan:
Wulcan my second game made for Ludum Dare! You pilot a space ship through an ever narrowing chasm in space. As the walls slowly close in on you, enemies will also barrage you from above. You ship comes equipped with the Alpha and the Beta guns. The Alpha gun shoots a blue bolt that will destroy enemies. The Beta gun shoots a pink bolt that will cause the walls to push back when it hits an enemy. It’s your job to get as far as possible!
Please read the readme on the download page because there aren’t directions in the game.
Wulcan runs in LÖVE and is written in my own programming language, MoonScript. More about the development process in a later post!
Thanks and enjoy!
Source is hosted on github: https://github.com/leafo/ludum-dare-23
Tags: gif, love2d, moonscript
Hello everyone. This is my third Ludum Dare. I am really excited about this one because I haven’t made a game since LD23! I’ve already been working for the past 3 hours (wow it’s been 3 hours already!), but I figure I should post I’m in before it’s too late!
Here’s a little teaser of what I’ve got so far:
I have no idea what I’ll be making yet! I’m quite intimidated by the theme to be honest. Going to try to get some basic graphics and movement working before going to bed tonight, then figure out the rest tomorrow.
Sadly, I have to go to a wedding Saturday evening, which is going to take a huge chunk of time. So I may have to bail on the comp, and do the jam instead. I took monday off from work just in case 😉
Follow me on twitter as I post updates and good luck to everyone!
Language: MoonScript (compiles to Lua)
Editor: gvim
Framework: LÖVE
Library: LoveKit
Graphics: GIMP
Music: Renoise
Sounds: as3sfxr and Audacity
Tags: love2d, lua, moonscript
I’ve spent way too much time writing an auto-tiler, something I should have done before LD! Maybe I can start figuring out what my game is now. 
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2012 at 10:35 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.
HELLO EVERYONE. I finished my game for the jam, but never posted here. So I’m here to deliver a public service announcement, you should play my game (and rate it)!
There were a couple performance issues at first, but I’ve fixed them. If you tried to play before and it didn’t work, please try again.
Thanks!
Tags: gif, love2d, moonscript
Hello everyone, I’ve uploaded a timelapse a bit ago for the development of my game ExoSlime. If you haven’t played it yet, you should! Here’s a preview of what to expect:
And here’s the timelapse:
Tags: gif, lua, moonscript, timelapse
Watch me make my game!
This time around I record my face the whole time, but I did it really stupidly. I actually had a camera program open for the 48 hours, meaning I could watch my face. It actually turned out to be quite distracting, and it took up quite a bit of the screen. Next time I’ll prepare something a bit less annoying, but I’m glad I did it because it definitely makes the video a lot more interesting.
If you haven’t played yet….
X-Moon
I’ve come up with a name for my game, it’s called Moondar. Here’s the title screen I laboriously painted before going to bed last night. Now I just need to try to finish the game.
Click to zoom in.
Tags: love2d, moonscript
PROUDLY PRESENTING MOONDAR
You’re stuck on a runaway moon buggy speeding across planet Moondar. Enemies attack from above while obstacles come from ahead. It’s your job to stay alive by steering the moon buggy out of harm as you destroy the alien invaders! It’s got cool dual mode gameplay, awesome soundtrack, and sweet minimalist graphics (lol).
Tags: love2d, lua, moonscript
Hello everyone! I want to apologize for not rating more games. I’ll get on that shortly, but in the meantime I made something really cool to browse all the games from the last Ludum Dare, it’s (very descriptively) called the Ludum Dare 26 Games Browser. Check it out!
If you hover over the game you can get access to the game page, the author, how many votes they have and their coolness. Also you can click the download icon on the top left to get a list of all the game’s downloads. If you have any feature ideas tell me.
Tags: moonscript
Hey everyone, I launched a site called itch.io for indie games about 6 months ago and I’m looking to have your game be part of it!
itch.io gives you a platform for creating a customized webpage page for your game along with free host for downloads. When I last wrote about it only supported downloadable games but I’ve enhanced it to work with flash/java/unity games as well! (HTML5 coming soon!)
In my opinion the coolest part of the site is that it lets you set a minimum price on downloads for your games. For example, you could set a minimum price of 0, people would be able to download your game for free, but if there’s someone nice who really likes your game they could throw some money your way. I think it’s really empowering considering most of us probably create games to give out for free but never really give players the option to pass some money back up to the developer.
I’ve been really enhancing the site over the past few months, one of the latest features I’ve added is the ability to set minimum prices on individual files. So you could offer your game for one amount, but encourage people to give a little more to get extras like a soundtrack, more levels or maybe even other games you’ve created. I’ve got a lot more features planned that are coming up soon after this Ludum Dare.
Anyway, enough blabbing, check out some of the games on the site: http://itch.io/browse
And here’s the FAQ if you want more information: http://itch.io/about/faq
Tags: itchio
