This is our first Ludum Dare as a group. Our team consists of Nathan, our lead (and only) coder, Felix who will be working on the visuals, Tom & Archie in the “music” department and myself: Alex the chief tea maker and stream manager!

Language: Action Script 3

Engine: 8thPlague (A homebrew engine http://natpat.net/2013/08/23/ludum-dare-engine/ )

IDE: FlashDevelop

Graphics: Gimp 2

Music: Fruityloops, bfxr

We’re streaming at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

Good luck to everyone!

Literal_Games

After several hours of blood, sweat and a distinct lack of caffeine we managed to somehow fit 7 monitors round a tiny table . Using expert cable management (a complete mess) combined with precision placement (placing peripherals wherever they would fit) we finally have a work station semi- fit for the jam!

Now that a theme of a side scrolling strategy game is settled, our artist finally got to work on some of the units!

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

Waking up at about 9: 30 UK time the 5 of use trawl through some possible ideas we could do for the concept 10 seconds. I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep or the fact that the room is poorly ventilated but ideas seemed to be a bit sparse. Initially we thought maybe a platformer with shifting parameters every 10 seconds would be a solid concept…. TOO BORING said the artist. Second came the idea of trying to finish second in a race 10 times… TOO STUPID said the coder. Thirdly came the top down survival situation with a changing environment…. I CAN’T MAKE MUSIC THAT’S 10 SECONDS LONG said the musician. Finally after much debate all 3 parties accepted the idea of an RTS with a 10 second prep time to adapt to a situation before combat begins…. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT said the blog writer.

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

A follow up to our last post here’s the images incorporated into a basic selection screen with countdown!

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

After several hours of work our Artist has completed a movement animation for our heavy troop!

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

We’ve recently created a twitter and soundcloud!

To the soundcloud we’ve uploaded some test clips and rough sound tracks, so please check them out and tell us what you think!

Literal Games

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

We’ve made great progress as a team towards creating our first game. Tom and Archie have both been working on the music and have managed to get the hang of a program that was completely alien to them 30 hours ago, and are making progress towards the various music that we need. Nathan has coded the basics of the game, including terrain, player set up and unit movement. Felix has drawn five characters, having finished the rest and walking animations for all of them as well as the action animations for a few. We’re all really tired.

Night for Literal Games!

With the animations coming on smoothly, Nathan, our coder has begun work on combat and movement. Here’s a glimpse into the combats early stages!

We’ve been constantly updating to environments visuals…. next is the back drops!

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

Please have a look at our most recent music and tell us what you think

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

Nearing the end of the second day of the jam we have almost completed the combat mechanics, terrain is being drawn and most of the basic character models are complete.

Above is the complete sprite sheet for the heavy soldier. From the top you have his idle, movement, attacking and death images. There are 5 other characters in the making currently…. so we’ve got a lot of work on our hands!

Watch us stream at http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

Everything is starting to come together reasonably well! The main graphics and animation are practically finished, so while the combat is being balanced Archie is starting level design. The final music tracks were completed this morning – Victory and Defeat themes – which you can check out on our SoundCloud!

There’s still a bit to do in terms of making this a proper game, ie, making a title screen and tutorial, but we hope that won’t take too long…

And as always we are still streaming! http://www.twitch.tv/literalgames

After slogging through the last day, hitting many roadblocks and speed bumps, we have a finished product. I present to you:

Submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26056

This was our first jam as a group, and I think I can safely say we all found it super fun. Even if the finished product is buggy, short and unbalanced, we made a game, and a pretty decent one at that.

Post-mortem and timelapses to come. But now… sleep!

Last summer, we entered our first Ludum Dare as a group. It was so much fun, we’re already getting hyped up about doing it again – so over the next month and a half, we’re going to be doing a whole load of preparation and somehow putting it out there for you all to see.

Our stream last time didn’t get above 15 viewers, and this time we’d love for that to be more, so we’ve decided to start drumming up interest now. We’ve started up a blog where you can follow our endeavours (although we’ll be cross posting most of the stuff we do here).  We’ll be posting, practising streaming, reviewing previous LD48 games and maybe even doing a mock 24 hour run, so stay tuned if you’re as excited as we are!

Links to: Blog, Stream, and our latest LD entry (LD27)

For our first update, we’re going to be doing a super in-depth video post mortem with the newest member of our group, which should be up sometime in the coming week!

Our stream is up and running, more or less, but we’re very excited about what we’re streaming this time. We’re cooking at the moment, come and say hi!

We’re doing things a little differently to most streams, we’ll be posting a nice timetable later today. Tune in for all kinds of surprises!

twitch.tv/literalgames

Realised I forgot to declare my engine and tools, so here they are!

I’ve been working on my own AS3 engine for quite a while now. It’s pretty barebones, but it has some pretty nifty functions and classes that will hopefully save my lots of time this upcoming Ludum Dare. It’s got particles, input handling, spritesheet handling, tweens and eases, some basic GUI stuff, sound effects, and a few other helpful bits and pieces.

Hopefully the work I put into it will pay off this weekend!

It’s avaliable at https://github.com/gnatpat/natpats-basic-as3-engine.

And I was bored coming up to this Ludum Dare, so I made a tool to help with animation – and as per the LD rules, I’m making it and the source available to download.

Source: http://natpat.net/stuff/AnimCreator.zip

You can export stuff to the format needed to add animations to my spritesheet implementation, but apart from that you can preview animations which is pretty cool.

Finally, come watch us stream at http://twitch.tv/LiteralGames! It’s 2am here but we’re gunna do an hour of planning before bed!

Before we go to bed (it’s 2am UK time!), we’ve put up a big whiteboard and are brainstorming!

Come join us and contribute if you like! twitch.tv/literalgames

We’re not really sure where we’re going yet, we’ve been asleep for 5 hours.

However, we do have this:

Connected Worlds! Trading! Inaccurate Geography!

Not sure what’s happening yet but there’s probably gonna be pirates! twitch.tv/literalgames for watching me draw boats

Hi, if you’ve got a minute, we’d love if you could listen to our first attempts at a sea-faring tune! (those two with the boat image)

Feedback is welcome in the comments or on our stream: twitich.tv/literalgames

[Final Name Pending]

We’ve got a couple of hours left and we’re planning to have something playable by the time we go to sleep (3am UK time – 25 hours after the theme announcement!)

The basic building blocks are in place, with trade routes for our ships, a moveable map and the beginnings of ports!

Join us on the stream to see if we can manage it, twitch.tv/literalgames AND have a chat (we need help staying awake!)

Meanwhile, have an explosive gif:

BOOM! (Pending a bit of boat jiggle to give impact)