Just a quick post to state that I’m joining the ranks of those aiming to make their first LD submission this weekend. How much time I actually get is variable, but I’m hoping to have something to present for the competition. At the very least I’m sure to learn something from all this!
I will be using:
Now that the Red Bull is wearing off and I’m losing my gift of sight, it’s time to call it a night and finally admit I’m halfway through the weekend (UK time here). Progress has inevitably not been as good as hoped, partly due to having several hours of my day stolen by my call into work (damn you day job!). But at least I have the idea, a foundation with a player character and a level, and all of Sunday still to come.
The idea will involve turning hostile robots against each-other using nothing more than your awesome hacking skillz. Not that I even have the enemies just yet…
Tomorrow will be a busy day...
So I thought I’d take a quick look back at my first experience of a Ludum Dare event now that I’ve fully recovered from what the final push did to me! I ended losing about 10 hours of my 48 to my day job: combined with my inexperience in producing something in such a short space of time… well, it was certainly a challenge.
Overall I’m very pleased with how this weekend’s development of “The Robots and I” (link) went: I genuinely feared I would fail to have anything to submit by the deadline, but I managed it. At the same time there are so many little additions/improvements I would have liked to get in there that could have made a difference.
FAIL
Success – Concept. I had my idea within a few hours of seeing the theme and quickly committed to it. I knew I had to do this to have a hope in finishing my entry, but if I had not been able to turn the idea into a game I could be content with it would all be for nothing. Thankfully the idea remained pretty rock solid in my mind.
Success – Productivity. With my time limited (and a history of losing motivation in my own little projects), I had to get my head down and produce. And for the most part I did! I was very happy with how my “shifts” at my PC went. With the possible exception of the last hour-or-so when I had become almost delirious with mental fatigue. Hey-ho!
Failure – Missing features. There’s no doubting the game is far from clear on what you have to do when it starts and this has been called out to me by most people who have given me their opinions on it. I had planned to have some sort of help text guiding you to your first “hack” but, like several other features I had hoped to get in, didn’t make it due to time. It also might have been worth adding a couple of alternative maps to mix things up a little.
Failure – Tweaking/polishing. While I obviously couldn’t have justified polishing when the core game was not yet completed, I regret to some extent that I wasn’t able to afford any time whatsoever to getting the game playing a bit nicer and looking a bit more interesting. I think a little bit of work on the player movement and interaction with the robots could have had a big impact.
I may return to this game shortly to try making it into something a bit more fun and rewarding to play, but right now it serves as the end result of a greatly entertaining and educational experience that I’m sure to build on in future. Bring on LD19! 😉
I wasn’t really intending to enter this weekend, but since getting snowed in it seemed a better idea. So this is both my declaration of intent and half-time update.
I really didn’t want to do something obvious with the theme, so have settled on something… a bit odd. In theory it’s some sort of RPG training school sim. You must DISCOVER the potential among fifty eager youngsters to finally settle on a team of five to take on the Demon Lord and save the land (naturally). If I get around to coding that bit. Needs a lot of work to actually be a game of some form.
Okay so this theme definitely won me over – I will be putting together a game for the latest MiniLD, and I’m looking forward to it! I considered one of the engines tailor-made for visual novels and the like, but have decided rather to stick with Flixel. I expect to do the vast majority of the development on the weekend of the 25th but I have started laying the foundations.
The game will simply focus around one conversation – a “chance encounter” made while commuting. The usual over-ambitious hope is to present the player with a slew of contextual questions and responses to use throughout the exchange; with your options, and their responses, being affected by the chemistry of the encounter. By “slew” I’ll probably end up with three, but I’ll see how far I get! If all else fails I might just replace every button with JASON!
I'm on a train!
About time I made a note of what I’m up to! I’ve gone for an isometric-running around trying to escape a mysterious building while being hounded by hordes of sinister enemies sort of thing. Are they human? Maybe they were… once. Who knows! Also, due to the appearance of the tiles I’ve laid for the floor, I am finding it really, really difficult not to add an element of DISCO to this. Anyhow, that’s it for now; plenty yet to do.
Tags: Flixel
So I finished my game last night! I really struggled with the theme at first – one of those that can be used for a game in so many ways it was hard to pin something original and interesting down. While I’m not convinced I truly achieved that in my concept, this has been by far my best execution on a Ludum Dare to date. I actually had a little time to polish! But no DISCO 
Click to go to the game page
So, pretty happy. I also took a timelapse with Chronolapse that I stuck up on YouTube if anyone’s interested:
Following an enjoyable LD #21 I will be entering once again, but for the first time I will leave Flixel/Flash by the wayside and attempt to make something of value in Unity! This may or may not happen but at the least it’ll be a damn good learning experience, I reckon.
So I will be using Unity, perhaps with a bit of Blender, plus my other usual favoured tools: GIMP, FL Studio and bfxr.
Bring it on 
Tags: unity
What happens when a tiny baby is left alone in a tower of abominations? Certain death for the young one?? Well, what if that baby is the most powerful baby wizard in the known world!? Then… we shall see…! (I don’t entirely know yet.)
BABY WIZARD VS HEAD SPIDER
Tags: unity
I got caught up in my own dodgy logic for far too long towards the end of today, which hasn’t helped my outlook, but at least my battle system is now functional if very limited. This is proving quite a crash-course in Unity scripting! Lots to do tomorrow (of course), time for a bit of sleep now.
Tags: unity
Here’s my timelapse, complete with faffing around in Unity like a noob:
I wrote some thoughts about my weekend on my blog, but generally: very happy with how I managed to get to grips with Unity, and very much looking forward to using it again in future. As for the game… I hope people see where I was going with it, even if it is a little unfriendly to the player! But overall another great Ludum Dare weekend (that’s 5 now :O).
Edit: Oh yeah, the game page is over here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=1626
I’m controversially trying to make a game that is at once capable of inducing fear, yet also incredibly colourful… I have to say I’ve really been enjoying messing around with this idea. It’s a sort of reality-screwing first-person puzzler (Portal – also Narbacular Drop actually – is an influence). It’s all about the colours…
Tags: unity
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-31/?action=preview&uid=1626
Thanks to my friend @Funktimus_Prime for the genius title “Three Colours: DEATH”! Have at it!
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 at 6:24 pm and is filed under MiniLD #31. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
10th anniversary? Of course I’m in! And this will be my… 5th entry into the main compo.
I’ve umm-ed and arr-ed about my choice of framework for a while. But being the anniversary and everything, I’m going to take it back to where I started with Flixel and make something awesome in an environment I’m comfortable in. Yeah!
So in summary:
So my interpretation of “tiny world” has led me to a loose re-imagining of the subset of folk tales involving a chap named Jack and various giants. Jack and his entire tiny world are under threat from The Big Ones and their odorous stomping feet. The doom of his kingdom seems inevitable…!
…But first I have a lot of work to do on Day 2, of course. It just wouldn’t be Ludum Dare if I was having it easy.
Hello! Well, there’s a lot of games this time huh! And one of them is my 5th entry, a game I called “Jack”.
This time I went wild and made… a pixel-arted platformer! So cliché, I know, but it’s actually the first game of this kind I’ve personally put out there. The theme “Tiny World” once again didn’t fill me with delight, but here’s what I came up with: giants are threatening the Tiny Kingdom beneath them and you, as Jack, must defeat them! Obviously this is deriving from Jack the Giant Killer/Jack and the Beanstalk etc. It has a silly sense of humour, no less than 3 pieces of music I somehow found time to compose and can be finished in less than a minute.
And here’s that timelapse!
I’m in.
I will very soon be going through the horrors of moving flat but you better believe I’m delaying the move so I can hang on to my current set-up long enough to Dare my face off. I have entered numerous times before, but that’s the past – this will be my best 48-hour game EVAR. Maybe. I’ll certainly try.
Expecting I’ll stick to Flixel for this. Looking forward to it!
After a somewhat troubled first day of diminishing progress, I have most of the mechanics in place for my quite simple concept in the hopes of heaping on juicy polish tomorrow! Well once I’ve got shooting, enemies, any semblance of level design/audio… you know, just a few small things. I would describe it as… a bit like asteroids in single-screen rooms with things to collect where your ship periodically has a litter of ill-fated triplets of which only one can survive.
Tags: flash, Flixel, screenshot
A quick post to recognise I completed the compo again! I’m not sure exactly what went wrong this weekend but my progress on Saturday particularly was not great. Don’t want to make excuses but I do have a bunch of distractions going on at the minute.
Anyway, I still managed to make this little arcadey shooter! It’s a bit slow to get going but the bullets will start to fly the deeper you go. As I tweeted, I feel good to have got this game out of me so I can push on to greater things in future! Oh and here is my timelapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRe6MzKSTg
Congrats to everyone completing, some amazing efforts once again.
Edit: Struggling with embedding the vid, don’t know why
