Love Apple Games gamedev team is in for the jam! Our team consists of Boris van Schooten (tmtg.net) and Val Jones (val_hax).
Our tools of choice:
Good luck everyone!
Here’s the Love Apple Games gamedev team with a late “we’re in” post. We spent this afternoon working out the game on paper and are ready to begin implementing!
Our tools of choice:
Good luck everyone!
Love Apple Games gamedev team is in for the jam! Our team consists of Boris van Schooten (tmtg.net) and Val Jones (val_hax).
For software development we are going to use jgame.js and possibly the new game development toolkit CellSpace (beta).
Graphics: Tiny Sprite Editor, Gimp, Inkscape, Evolvotron.
Sound: SFXR, Audacity, LMMS, a microphone, and possibly a keyboard.
More info about the dev tools:
Jgame.js is a 2D game library based on WebGL, which we’ve been using for our previous games.
CellSpace is built on top of it, and enables tile-based game development by defining tile rewrite patterns (cellular automata style). It comes with an IDE and a sprite editor. It has similarities with PuzzleScript, but allows action games with smooth animation to be developed as well! See the screenshot below.
Hi all! Love apple games is in for the jam! Team members: Boris, Val.
Tools:
Loveapple Games proudly present our entry, Scaleshifter. In this game the goal is to collect DNA to evolve increasingly better scaleshifter abilities, enabling you to zoom deeper and deeper into the natural world.
The first day was mostly spent brainstorming. That includes inspirational activities, like the consumption of Bratwurst in the Saturday market.
One of the first things that came to mind is to do something with zooming and change of scale. It appears almost no-one in LD was doing that, so that seemed really interesting. The scale change would have to be more than a gimmick though, and form a central part of the game mechanic. There had to be a reason for the player to keep shifting scale.
We thought up a lot of crazy stuff, such as zooming into a maze shaped like a Hilbert curve, climbing into a fractal tree, going into the human body, or something like Katamari Damacy.
The goal in the second day is to have a first prototype running, and start on the sound effects. We settled on shoot/pick up game mechanics that involve zooming: zoom in to collect items, zoom out to navigate and shoot enemies.
One inspiration that got us started on the visuals was a "zoom effect" shader we found on Shadertoy. We spent a little too much time on making the WebGL shader zoom exactly in sync with the sprites. The shader code was bad and required a complete rewrite. Shader code can be quite a b*tch to get right. But the day ended with the zoom visuals working!
We also did the first batch of sounds. To make the audio sound more natural, we use multiple almost identical samples for each sound effect. Sadly we couldn't use LMMS this time, so no music. We did not get it to work on our PC, and on the tablet PC the buttons and text were too small.
On the third day the whole game still needed to be programmed, but this was fairly straightforward. One challenge was efficiency: the number of sprites grows exponentially with the zoom level, so there were thousands of moving objects, even though only a fraction of them were visible at any time. We had to optimize the game engine some, though it needs more optimization still.
We already had some sounds so we quickly got sound in the game. Meanwhile we did three more batches of sound effects to improve and add to the sound.
Sounds were mainly vocalisations or involved hitting things around the house with various objects. Failed attempts at enemy death splat sounds included dropping ziplock bags of water into the bath and hitting cushions with wooden spoons. A long bout of recording screams got me worried that the neighbours would call the police – but that didn’t happen. That worries us too...
We also sourced some sounds from JFXR. All audio was mutilated (sorry, post-processed) personally by us using Audacity.
We used a creaky old smartphone for audio recording. For eating food sounds we used poor man’s apples (carrots).
But the carrots went downhill a bit by the time the ratings system was working.
Can you spot the sound made by hitting this radiator with this cat litter scoop? You might also hear a kind of faint cello sound in the background, with doppler effect. As far as we can tell, that was a passing car. Looks like the house is just a massive sound box.
Have fun and let us know what you think!
We've been brainstorming this afternoon, and it's time to get down to the PC after eating our regular "LD brainstorm Bratwurst". We like the theme a lot. Time for our "We're in" post!
Our tools:
Good luck and have fun everyone!
Getting On is a retro-style comic take on 80s arcade games. It has 3 minigames inspired by Pac-man, Donkey Kong and Q-Bert. Now, 30 years on, the original game consoles are battered and glitchy and so are the characters...
In Pac-man - The Divorce, Pac-man is chased not by ghosts but by Ms Pac-man and her lawyers as they all compete to gobble up the dots (coins), that is, Pac-man's hard-earned dosh.
In Donkey Kong Senior, Mario is still going strong (well, maybe not quite so strong...) and is still quite lethal - he slams enemies with his Zimmer frame.
Q-Bert was always a bit whacky - sadly he’s now a hopeless dope head and calls himself Q-Bud.
The glitches that appear in each level must be run over - to stop them slowing things down even further, and to boost flagging battery power.
We spent almost a whole day brainstorming game ideas before we started on the actual games. Boris did the graphics, music and programming, using his homebrew WebGL game library (https://github.com/borisvanschooten/jgame.js), and LMMS for the music. Val did the game sounds. Smartphone mike for recording, Audacity for audio processing of game sounds. Some waveforms were sourced from and processed on JXFR before being further mangled with Audacity.
Some of Val’s audio equipment ...
Rest of the team (aka our Vomcats, who inspired several of our previous games) were not so productive. Vomcat1 hangs out with pears...
... while Vomcat2 wasted Loveapple’s VR setup.
We were powered by junk food, meat, sugar, and wine (and catfood???) ...
Greetings from our urban gamedev studio!
Our tools of choice:
Good luck everyone!
Winter is nearly over! With your trusty sheep dog Jess, search the hills, round up your sheep and bring them down to the safety of the farm. Watch out for ravenous wolves and deep icy lakes!
Shepherdy! was inspired by the Herdwick sheep, an ancient hardy breed farmed for centuries in the English Lake District. The sheep are taken up to the high fells (hills) for the winter. In spring the shepherds round up their sheep and bring them back down the valley.
You need keyboard controls as well as mouse, so play on laptop or PC. Enjoy!
The game is an experiment in flocking algorithms. The sheep and wolves are governed by two different flocking behaviours. Basically, each entity moves towards the center of the herd and keeps an optimal distance from neighbouring entities.
For graphics we used Tinyspriteeditor and Gimp. Game sounds were created by us (mainly vocalisations and abuse of household objects), recorded on a smartphone and processed with Audacity. Music was done in the last hour before submission using LMMS.
Herdwick sheep have long thick fleeces and come in several colours including grey, inky blue and brown. During winter they wander the fells at heights of over 3,000 feet (around 1000 metres) and take care of themselves by foraging. They can weather the bitter winters and have been known to survive being buried under snow for days by eating their own wool. They were farmed for meat as well as wool. Herdwick mutton (meat) was served at the coronation banquet of Queen Elizabeth II.
The name comes from Old Norse herdvyck, meaning "sheep pasture". It’s thought they were brought to England by the Vikings.
The ewes teach their lambs which area of the fell (heaf) they should stay in. Herdwicks are still farmed today; thankfully the breed survived the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that hit England and Wales in 2001.
We first thought the sheep dog should be a border collie but then chose a Rough Collie (like Lassie). Rough Collies originated in Scotland and Wales and have also been used for sheep herding in traditional hill farming. In the 19th Century Queen Victoria made the Rough Collie popular as a fashion accessory!
However the Graphics Gremlin threw a spanner in the works and our Jess ended up as some kind of mongrel terrier!
We've been brainstorming this morning, and it's time to get down to the PC! One idea we came up with is combining a jigsaw puzzle with a shooter.
Our tools:
Good luck and have fun everyone!
Our game has received 16 ratings, but to our dismay the system has already switched to the Danger filter. We planned to do the ratings in the 2nd and 3rd week, but that plan is now ruined. Generally, if we understand correctly, raters no longer have an incentive to rate, because it will not increase their game's rank. We knew the same thing happened during LD40, but it was only in the last 2-3 days, not the whole week! It's possible to switch the game sorting manually, but if LD40 is any indication, raters do not seem to do this very often. There must be a lot of people with this problem! We are unhappy that this happened without a proper announcement, so there was no way to plan for this.
Our game is "Frogger: the Jigsaw"
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/frogger-the-jigsaw
Also check out our search engine (under development):
http://tmtg.nl/ld41
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRYex30jF_4
Our retro-styled game mashes up the classic favourite Frogger character with the frantic world of the fast action jigsaw puzzle. Placing a piece extends the playing field, but there are moving enemies on each piece you have to avoid or shoot!
Our Frogger leaves the ground to play with the traffic in the sky and outer space. Avoid flying cars and blast enemy stealth helicopters in the sky levels. In space you get to dodge Mars Rovers and lethal tumbling space junk in what looks like the left overs from a smash up of Red Dwarf (respect, Grant Naylor!)
This LD, we had more than the usual share of trouble. The ranking system swiched to "Danger" much earlier than we expected. We saw our ratings stagnate because we were not yet near the top of the danger rank. And we saw a lot of people with the same problem post advertisements of their games. Please POV, tell us next time when you do this, and not create such a panic!
This wasn't the only trouble that hit us, because Chrome decided to push an update that blocks audio for many HTML5 games, halfway through Ludum Dare. We had trouble getting 20 ratings on audio, but we --just-- managed it now! More audio ratings appreciated. We created a workaround, but you need to click a mouse button or press a key before any sound starts playing. It should work without any issues on Firefox or IE11/Edge though.
We also created a search page to enable search and Google indexing of the LD41 games. We think the standard interface is myopic, with only few games showing at a time, and no proper search functions. If there is interest we can develop it further. You can find it here: (http://tmtg.nl/ld41/)
As always, thanks for all the great games - we had a lot of fun playing other peoples' games and making this one. Also thanks for the many positive and useful comments on our game. Good luck everyone!
Boris and Val (Loveapple Games)
CONTROLS:
Credits:
https://youtu.be/eofuXoi2_Vs
https://youtu.be/iMe9aPH83Hc
We are in!
Our tools:
Good luck and have fun everyone!
We're in! Tools:
Good luck everyone! Boris+Val
Awake late today, after sleeping on the theme. Or rather lying awake a lot thinking about the theme :-)
Our tools:
Good luck everyone!
We're in! Tools:
Good luck everyone! Boris+Val
We made a warmup game. It's still an alpha version. It's nice enough to polish it a bit I think, so I plan to do multiple difficulty levels and explosions. Thanks to MiniBobbo for hosting a warmup weekend again!
Original warmup weekend post: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/$179343/ld-46-warmup-weekend-1
Warmup weekend itch page: https://itch.io/jam/ld-46-warmup-weekend
Play the game here: http://tmtg.nl/ludumdare/ld46-warmup/
Hi! This is Boris from Loveapplegames. I am involved in game development for a living, and we are making an open source toolset for writing dialogues and interactive fiction for projects involving serious games. It's based on a language we call Wool, which originated from the Yarn language.
I've made a Web-based tool for editing and prototyping interactive fiction games, which can instantly export your game to an URL. If you want to try your hand at interactive fiction but are not sure where to start, give it a try!
-> The Wool editor documentation
-> Simple example game "The Gnome" (graphics courtesy of various authors)
Our Reflections warmup game is finished! It turned out nicely I think, with randomly generated puzzles. Thanks to MiniBobbo for hosting a warmup weekend again!
Original warmup weekend post: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/$179343/ld-46-warmup-weekend-1
Warmup weekend itch page: https://itch.io/jam/ld-46-warmup-weekend
Play the game here: http://tmtg.nl/ludumdare/ld46-warmup/
Mentally preparing for Ludum Dare, here is another example game I made this morning, based on the old dilemma facing game developers: drink coffee or sleep!
Again, made with the Web-based Wool interactive fiction / dialogue creation tool, which enables instant export of your game to an URL. If you want to try your hand at interactive fiction but are not sure where to start, give it a try!
-> My game, called "Ludum Dare: the game" (Hint: to complete the game, drink lots of coffee!)
