Since August of 2012 I have been intending to participate in the Ludum Dare. But, unmotivated and intimidated, I have yet to work up the courage to actually follow through with my promises of participation. But I’m finally doing it! First game I’ll have ever made, first Ludum Dare event, yet I’ve been programming since 4/10/12. Hopefully it won’t suck, which is the reason I chose to do the MiniLD before an actual LD. I’m jumping right into the deep end! Let’s do this! MiniLD #48!

Tags: first Game ever, miniLD #48, Tier42

I have had such difficulty with getting an engine working for the miniLD. However, after 24 hours of the competition (for me, at least, since I live on the west coast of the US) my game is starting to shape up! Now it’s time to start making enemies and levels… Good luck to everyone else who this is their first LD event also!

I am quite proud of what I pulled out of the mangled code of my game after what happened today. here’s a screenshot.

The player is the one in black. You are an assassin, who has deceived your former employer and are now working for one who wants him dead.

I’ve got some work to do still. But I am really enjoying this!

Here it is!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/py52jtq0f2ugy3z/miniLD%2048.zip

Ninja Assassin

made by Michael Nickels for the mini ludum dare #48

You are an Assassin who has turned on your former employer.
Your job is to kill his Prime Ministers before they, or their Guards, kill you.
In this game, you are the deceiver!

controls:

W A S D or the ARROW KEYS to move the player
E or V to attack
SHIFT or SPACE to run

Enjoy, and thank you for playing!

Hello fellow Ludum Dare peeps! I’m finally going to participate in a Ludum Dare!! This will be my first time competing in the compo, even though I participated in miniLD 48. I feel like I haven’t really ever given a game dev my all, I often get caught up on the little things and then get bored of the project halfway through. That will be a scenario I will have to avoid this weekend!

I will be programming in Java, with Eclipse Luna as my IDE.

My computer is a Lenovo ideapad laptop. Sadly, only one monitor for me. maybe I’ll hook up to my TV with an HDMI cable… XD

For art, I will use Gimp 2. Probably some 8-bit style art for simplicity’s sake, I’m not that proficient of an artist.

I don’t know what I’ll use for music. I love chiptune, and dubstep is fun. If anyone knows of any good, free, easy to learn programs that they use to make music for their games tell me about them! I might just make a really simple track in FamiTracker or something, but even that program is unwieldy for me to use…

Good luck to everyone else!

Hope you all are coming up with good ideas for the theme!

I went with the simplicity of a tower defense game. It will be easy enough to program, perfect for a first LD.

I had to rework a big chunk of my code a couple hours in, because I had daftly decided it would be cool to call the drawImage function for every single sprite on the screen inside my overridden paint function… Quite a disaster, and dumb. Much too slow. Now I have my render function handling the work before control is passed to the paint function, which is not throwing any errors! Yay for lack of red text!

It’s okay Java, I still love you.

I look forward to seeing what other people are coming up with tomorrow. With that, I bid you all good night, and good luck!

After a refreshing 7 hours of sleep, I’m ready to spend my entire Saturday working on this game. Good luck to everyone!

Hang in there, my fellow Ludum Dare participants!

I feel really good about my progress so far. My art is crap because I’m not an artist, but seeing my from-scratch code actually working is pretty satisfying.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far for my tower defense game:

• game loop & gui
• creating and killing enemies
• creating and removing towers
• towers fire projectiles and target enemies properly

Here’s my plan for the next 26 or so hours:

• add enemy wave forming & proper pathing
• graphics for towers, projectiles, and enemies (more art… ugh -_-)

Polishing goals:

• add a boss wave
• more towers, enemies, projectiles
• movement animations

I don’t know how much of what I would like this game to become I will get done, but I’ll try my best! Good luck to you all!

I guess I should post a screenshot of what my tower defense game looks like so far…

Obama Tower, GO! Defend the white house from those terrorists!

We’ll see how far i get with this before time is up. I would love to implement more art stuff, but that’s the most time-consuming part for me. After the Dare I intend to spruce this up, maybe commission a friend to make better art for it.

Well, I got my game done, which is the important thing. Sadly, whenever I exported it as a executable jar file, it would not run, although there were no syntax or otherwise errors in the project, and it ran fine in the IDE. :/ 48 hours wasted? Possibly. At least I have a game to show for it, I just need to figure out how to get my resources to load properly after export. I am quite disappointed in Java, Eclipse, myself… Honestly it should work, but whatever. I’m already too late. Guess I’ll have to wait until the next LD. In April, I believe?

Good job to everyone who made it! And good luck to all Jam participants! Finish stronk!

Oh, and here’s a screenshot of my finished tower defense game. It’s more of an engine, because I didn’t allocate time to creating more towers or enemies or projectiles, but I could easily implement more, and I think I will just for my own enjoyment. All code for this was made from scratch in the 48 hours, so I’m pretty proud that it works and is actually pretty nice.

Obama towers, terrorist and Nic Cage enemies!