Hey Guys!

Back for my third run at Ludum Dare. I had great fun making my last two entries, (Miniature Worlds, and Battle Arena Evolution), and I think I’ve learnt alot from those experiences.

I’m going with Haxe again as my defacto language. It has good syntax, ample features, and when done right, builds to Windows, Flash and Android in a blink.

I’ll be using my own light weight Haxe Engine, which just has a few core classes to help my dev.

Other tools:

• Flash CS5  (Vector Artwork)
• Paint Shop Pro 7 (Sprite manipulation)
• Audacity (All of the sound)
• Flash Develop (All of the code)
• SVN (Because version control)
• Pen and Paper (Because design)

Gonna be a mad one this time tho, as I have a busy weekend schedule to fit around Ludum Dare. I wish I’d organised better!

Preparation… preparation… preparation… winging it.

– John

‘Morning fellow Darer’s,

I awake to find, plesantly, and infact, to my amusement, that I Am the Villain.

It would seem appropriate then that I begin my quest for world domination here and now from my modest head quarters. With a black cup of coffee (as black as my soul), a pen, and some paper… so it begins.

Greetings once more my fellow… aha… scientists.

Your goals are as follows:

• Money
• Research
• Experimentation

Excel at these goals and you will become a masterful supervisor.

The test subjects are waiting for you.

The first batch of test subjects have arrived and have been placed into quarantine prior to submission to the laboratory.

Ahh, its been a long day, much going on besides the competition, but I feel I’ve made steady progress… lets see how the final hours turn out.

Evil never sleeps… but it had a restful day, and so, there’s more to be added to my game.

A story, some semblance of purpose, the goals of Death, Money, and World Domination are being woven in during these final hours… there is much to do…

The night draws to a close, and what a weekend… construction of the laboratory was bang on schedule, and with a well oiled machine the pieces snapped into place. The final few hours really were worth the effort, bringing a mere scientific simulation into a fully realised story driven game.

A fuller, juicier Post Mortem will follow, but right now, all I can say is… I love Haxe NME… not only did it make writing and producing the game a joy, but with minimal effort I got the Android and Windows/Desktop versions built and online. Its a joy to be able to make a game, and then share it so freely.

Merry Ludum everyone!

Test Subject Gamma – You are the Villain – Release R1

Good graces to the masses. Here I stand to make my declaration… I, once more, shall be participating in Ludum Dare.

To this end, I list my trusty tools:

• Planning – Pen and Paper
• Data + Code Gen – Data Fairy – https://code.google.com/p/data-fairy/
• Pixel Art  – Paint Shop Pro 7
• Vector Art – Adobe Flash CS5
• Language – Haxe NME http://www.nme.io/ http://haxe-foundation.org/
• Framework – Haxe Punk http://haxepunk.com/

I look forward to the time when battle commences.

Was a bit delayed during warm-up weekend, but I’ve checked out all my tools and made a neat little city building prototype using HaxePunk, DataFairy, and Flash Cs5 to draw some simple assets.

The sell button is bit bugged, but I’m not fussing over the small stuff.

Tip: Hold SHIFT down while clicking to build and sell multiple buildings.

Check it out: http://mkv25.net/showcase/games/product_v0.swf

I’m no master animator, but I figured… for the idea I want to pull off, I’m gonna need some basic walk frames to get me going.

How harmless can this little guy be?

The sketches infront of me suggest a series of plain white rooms, each with a puzzle to solve that unlocks the next… I think that’s good for a start, but I need to mediate on a story for the hero.

Sleep for now.

Here’s my battle station photo for posterity:

Sat sipping on a hot chocolate tapping away at the internets waiting for the final hour to count down… good luck everyone!

I don’t even.

It seems I’m developing a healthy case of flu, my brain is descending into mush, and I’m making like zero progress on this game.

I’m doomed.

Staying up to 4am turned out to be really productive, despite a mind numbing headache for 5 hours prior to midnight.
Still, here I am with a not-too-shabby game room explorer, but not a huge amount hot on gameplay.

Heading for the final stretch now to get some game goals and puzzles in.

With my own hands… just in the nick of time. I had hoped to have the final clean up down 3 hours ago, but frantic coding, title screens, a quick final boss character… seems like a ton of last minute ideas got crammed in :)… but all those bits make it much more complete as a game, and I’m proud that I didn’t give up 2 hours ago with the bare bones, and stuck with it that bit longer.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10967

Anyhow, less waffle: Play Tamborine Man

Thanks to Sasha for the name

(Note, this should have got posted last night, but my connection failed)

So I’m here at Insomnia 49 gaming convention. I’ve got my laptop, mobile phone… Pen, paper, and with any luck some power.

My tools for this dare will be:
– Haxe / Flash Develop
– Paintshop Pro 7
– Audacity
– BFXR

…

My goals are, no less, to realease a game this weekend.

Twitter has been my friend, been much easier to post there while rolling off ideas during the past few hours.

I spent most the day at Insomnia playing Starbound, totally no regrets there, so have only really started putting concrete ideas together in the past few hours.

Anyhow, these three screens should show what I’ve got:

Character Select ^

Encounters, Decisions ^

The story yet to be told ^

Keeping a grey background at the moment so I can break things up into assets, make the bits transparent, and hopefully later drop a background texture in.

So the idea is a medieval story, told in 10 seconds. The player has that time to pick their choices through the game. That means they’ve gotta be quick. At the end they can review their decisions and it’ll read off as a story. That is. What will make it interesting, I hope, is the the trade off between decisions and stories. I guess the game will be a form of top-trumps; choices will have different success or fail conditions based on how much Land, Gold, or Followers you have. So heading off against a preist, for example, might depend on how many followers you both have. From the player’s perspective, it should be dead simple to play, but several attempts will be needed to tease out the mechanics of the game and learn what the most effective choices are at any given point.

That’s the plan, I think. Sleep again.

I swear, I’m about to have a heart attack. I finished coding / testing 20 minutes ago, but then had the pleasure of hacking together the release + web page out of my previous entries at a frantic pace.
There’s no sound, but all the basic art and gameplay envisaged from my original design made it into the final game, so I’m really pleased with that. This felt more like a 24 comp then a 48, since I got about 2 hours done yesterday inbetween travelling between events and catching up with the Starbound crew (my heroes *fawn)… so today was a mad hackathon of ideas.

Anyhow, here’s the game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=10967
http://mkv25.net/ludum/ld27/preview/

Here’s some screenies:

Intro Screen

Character Picker

Gameplay Options

End Game Story

In theory, this should work well on mobile, but I’m not doing that tonight. :X Enjoy!

Hey guys, I suppose this is my declaration of intent.

I spent this evening doing up some tidy up work to make my usual project structure into a template, which I’ve made available through github:
https://github.com/Markavian/ldtemplate

The “sample app” can be seen here, which is very much a basic configuration of my core libraries:
http://mkv25.net/ludum/ldtemplate/preview/

The idea being I can check this out, and with minimum effort, start the “game design” process without fussing around with tools.

My framework is very lightweight, it features a Screen Controller, which drive individual Screens, an Event Bus, and an Index for statically referencing models and views. The other libaries are UI helpers to wrap native OpenFL Sprite, Text, and Bitmap objects, and make them a bit easier to configure and move around.

I enjoy coding as much as possible from scratch, treating Ludum Dare events as much a coding challenge as a gaming challenge. As much as anything, this project template is more about project management within the constraints of the 48 hour weekend then about actual coding style or best practice.

For the event I’ll be using:
– My Ludum Dare Project Template
– Haxe + OpenFL
– FlashDevelop IDE
– Paint Shop Pro 7
– Audacity + whatever sounds / music programs I can grab

Look forward to seeing you guys over the weekend, happy gamedev’in all!

You only get one… working on a story driven game.