Hi everybody this will be my first time entering LD. I’d like to present first my doodle. The highlighted creatures are the ones I plan on actually using. The only one that isn’t an enemy is Dot, which is the player’s character.

I love doodling, so this is a delightful topic for me. I plan to use the actual drawings as sprites, maybe colored with colored pencil.

Now it’s past bedtime where I am, so I’ll start coding tomorrow. I’ll be using Pygame, and I’ll probably join the IRC channel later.

Bye for now!

Hi everybody  I finally completed my MiniLD 33: Doodles entry.  I used the doodles as enemies.  They steal your Game Boy when you leave it unattended, and to get it back, you have to navigate through 5 doodles’ scrolling attacks.  You are a volatile dot that moves sort of like the Asteroids ship but with burners in 8 directions.

If you touch the black area, you get sent to the beginning of the level.  Each level has a different style attack, and it gets harder to navigate as you go.  The goal is to make it through every attack and get the Game Boy.  A secondary goal is to do it as quickly as possible because there’s a fastest times list.

Some levels force you to go backwards at times, and the dot is hard to control if you aren’t able to make it stop completely.  In case you’re interested in playing, there is a Windows executable and a Linux/source package available (if you have an old version, these link to updated versions with a bug fix and a distance remaining feature).  To run the source, you’ll need to have Python, pygame, and numpy installed.  The source can also be used to install the game on Linux.

There is a homepage with the download links and a few more screenshots.

Here’s something to consider for your game. This was written on the board at school today for some reason.

Two days of food, snacks and water are prepared, and I can rest until the theme announcement. For my game, I have an interactive audio visualization in mind that can be made quickly if I keep it simple!! I can commit at least the next 48 hours. For the code, I’ll be using Pygame and my Pygame framework. Although the framework is nowhere near stable, I’m posting a link to it because the rules require I share it. It’s public domain code and will remain so forever.

git clone http://git.a-o.in/pgfw/

The goal of Last Words is to post a coherent message before you die. After a severe accident, you’re left with 10 seconds to live and a message to convey. You should type and submit the message as accurately as possible before dying. The idea is partially inspired by the last ravings of a wounded gangster from the 1930s. Here is the way a level progresses:

Game loop

1. Choose to walk through the left or right door.  You die either way, but the choice determines the difficulty of the next message.  The stages are set up like in Out Run — walking toward the center makes the game harder, while staying on the outside makes it easier.
2. A terrible accident happens suddenly: you’re mauled to death, decapitated by bandits, devoured by wolves, impaled, treacherously fed poison, etc.
3. You think of something bizarre to say based on a glimpse of the afterlife — type it into your social app as quickly as possible before the message “You’re Dead” fully appears after 10 seconds.
4. Your score is based on how accurate the message is and how much time was left when you sent it.  If you don’t send it in time or your score is too low, the game ends.

I’m excited about the idea, and it is totally feasible for 2 days, but because I’m going to be busy with unrelated stuff for much of the remaining time, it’s possible I won’t be able to submit the game. I will do as much as I can before the deadline.  I’ve already written a lot of messages, recorded some music and drawn the main character.  There is still a lot left to do.  Almost everything, in fact.  Here is an image of the main character:

I’m using my Pygame library again.  It is open source and available to anybody who is interested.  I am so tired but having fun.  Good luck!

Electric Sieve

I took a few photos during the competition I would like to share.

My intestines were left a barren wasteland, but four cups of this ramen kept me from falling asleep.

I adorned my couch with members of the major snack groups: cookies, chips and jellies. At some point in my daze, I went back to the store and added sour candies. I ate fruit and vegetables, too. Plus, I drank a lot of coffee.

From Friday morning to Monday night, I slept once for 6 hours. I started early, prototyping all night before the competition and finished when I left for work. I hallucinated a few times. I saw a cartoon dog’s face in a tree and generally felt unusual.

Before the competition, I thought this mat could be my inspiration. I ended up using triangles for the sprites, so maybe it happened. I think this mat could also be a board game.

My Pygame library helps with cross-platform distribution and adds fun stuff to Pygame like animated sprites, cubic splines, screen captures and video recording.

It’s publicly available code you’re welcome to dig through.

git clone http://git.a-o.in/pgfw/

Other tools I’m using besides that and Pygame are

• milkytracker
• sfxr
• gimp
• emacs
• digital camera

But, at times like that is when the “God of Games” comes down and your body, even when sleeping, is doing work. So, perhaps we hallucinated the part about fixing the bug. Off-subject, but you start seeing things after the 2nd straight night. A hairy caterpillar… like electroplasma… you see things you just can’t describe.

— Yoshiki Ohka talking about programming Gain Ground

Joining with my Pygame framework

$ git clone http://git.a-o.in/pgfw/

I released the first post-jam version of my submission cakewalk. It is mostly a graphics update where the placeholder graphics for enemies are replaced by space rascals who are a fish, a shuriken, a flame and a cannon. There are also some graphics effects like a glowing line, explosion and warping level transition. All the updates are additions I wanted to make during the jam but didn't have enough time. They're meant to move the game away from a minimalist, abstract style toward something more substantial which I think makes more sense for the game since it already has a main character. And so now we know what the cake is up against!

These are zoomed in versions of very small 12x12 sprites. I didn't want to increase the size of the enemies because I would have to change the design to deal with new collision parameters, so I just made very small graphics. I like them, but well, they are tiny, and therefore difficult to both see and make. They look a lot better than the original X graphic, though.

The other graphics additions are effects generated by pygame code. The glowing line uses algorithmic generation to add a random gradient to the line each time a level loads. The portal and explosion are sprites built by looping through position and alpha parameters using ellipses. And the warp is a simple scaling effect that is generated at run time to avoid scaling a large image in real time.

https://youtu.be/cIOE2q2nspA

I started a dev log on itch (with basically the same information), and I also finally made a mac build for 64-bit OS X 10.14 (it should work on other 64-bit versions, but I haven't done a lot of testing for mac)! The OS X build is available on the jam submission page along with Windows and Linux versions.