terry has found a place for us to meet! This is what he says:

“Any indies still in San Francisco, we’re meeting for a jam at the noisebridge hackerspace Friday for the day! We’ll be there from 11am or so.
It’s at 3rd floor of 2169 mission street, near the 16th street Bart station.”

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 8:41 pm and is filed under MiniLD #24. 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.

I’ve added the protagonist .. the harmless cabin dwellers!

I also decided that my photos of the physical can of Blob Repellent weren’t awesome enough, so I CGed the label on so it looks shinier. Next up – making some real gameplay .. Once I’m happy with that it’ll be time to wrap things up with some good ol’ fashioned polish (music, sfx, menus!)

-Phil

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 9:44 pm and is filed under LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!. 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.

Hey,

I ported my Jam game over to Android !

However, many users have had crashes, etc… if any devs can give it a run and do an “adb logcat” and post the results here, that would be a huge help!

(The game is also available on iOS, PC, Mac, Linux too, if anyone cares to check it out!)

-Phil

UPDATE: Android build is so broken I took it down.

Thanks everyone for your generous contributions! It’s awesome seeing the community come together to help keep this site afloat! The FUNdraiser is now over, so may your year be filled with many 48-hour game jams!

The donation system is still available if you really want to contribute more. At this point our hosting should be covered for over a year, so contributions above and beyond will be used at the organizers discretion. (I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of giraffes …) But really, we’ll probably keep a hefty buffer in case our hosting costs go up again After the optimization we did to the site, though, I’m hoping our costs will stay under control.

I just want to say a thanks again, this has been an awesome year for Ludum Dare and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012!

-Phil
P.S. a special thanks to PoV (Mike Kasprzak) for setting up the donation system! It worked great!

So, last year I tried the challenge and I guess I won, sort of, but sort of not, because I never really finished the game.

I’m doing another attempt at the game except going overhead instead of isometric and using the aesthetic of an old LD game I made “Escape from Anathema Mines” instead of the one I was doing ..

Anyway, here’s a screenshot. I’m doing brute-force ray casting here and it works great. It’s really nice to be targeting the desktop using C, so I can do stuff like that. (The older LD version was in python so I had to code it smart, and if I were targeting mobile I’d have to be more optimized.) Anyway, my goal is to have this game selling on the Mac App Store before the end of the month for a few bucks.

-Phil

P.S. I coded up some crazy tile generator to get all the wall contours Yay for python!

So, here’s my level editor thing. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to set up the level entrances / exits / pathways throughout the level. Sort of some kind of cryptic code system. I’m not sure how complicated I want it to be. Depends on if I will have the level editing open to the general public or not.

That said, I think I want it to be editable by normal people. So I think I’ll probably pass on using those weird codes. But at least now I have those cool hex icons for no reason.

-Phil

So .. I’ve done a ton to the game in the last day or so. Got all the in game features working nicely and stuff. The most notable visual change is the addition of characters. Check out these lil’ guys! These are the same guys I used in the original “Dynamite” I made for pyweek like a million years ago. They work pretty well scaled down and tiny. Next up, I gotta add a basic save/load interface for my level editor and then start churning out levels and all that!

Oh, and I grabbed all the sound effects from Dynamite and Escape from Anathema Mines and added them into this game. Makes it feel a bit more lively! I’ve also added “data cartridges” that display text messages when picked up, I guess that’s the cheap way to give a game some vague story-line.

-Phil

UPDATE: Using my cool-sauce edge generation script, with just a few minutes of graphics work I can get a totally different look to my game. This is going to be super helpful to giving my low-budget game the appearance that it has art in it (maybe).

Weird and squiggly:

Fractalicious Puzzle Shaped:

Square:

I think with varying the user flashlight color and varying the floor texture I can probably get some really different feeling settings for the game to take place

-Phil

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 at 7:18 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2011. 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.

So .. some fun stuff here!

I’ve added a level selector to my editor so I can start working on multiple levels in my game:

I’ve added zoom in / out into my editor so I can get the big picture of my layouts:

And I’ve added shadows to my characters so it looks nicer:

Not entirely sure if I’ll make the Oct.31 deadline, but I’m making quite a bit of progress. I’ll keep plodding along and see where I’m at in a few days!

-Phil

Hey … my October Challenge game is making real progress!

Here’s the deal: I’m using Steam to distribute the beta, so you need a Steam key. I only have a limited number of those, so first come first serve. Get a beta key here. They only work for Windows right now, so if you’re a mac guy like me .. well, you’ll have to wait (or run it under VMWare or something. It works fine that way as well.)

I’m totally looking for any and all feedback you can provide, the game even includes a chat-window that probably won’t be in the final game but is in the beta so that you can chat with me / other players / or just complain about bugs / give suggestions. All the chat is logged so I can review it later

Thanks a ton! This October Challenge has been great (even if it’s lagging into December now ..) TBH I think this game will be done in maybe 2-3 months. But it’s been fun!

-Phil

P.S. If anyone knows a musician who can do good “sneaking around in caves” type music, I’d love to hear about it. Post a link in the comments to their portfolio.

(I’ve already got an artist lined up to help me with adding a bit of sparkle to the logo / icons / menus / etc.)

Yo, I’m totally in this time! I’ll probably be jamming cause my toolchain is so clogged with my commercial stuff now, but ya never know.

Compo code base:
– python / pygame
– AS3, which I don’t know, but I’ve hacked a few crummy things together in it before
– dev under linux and port to windows

Jam code base:
– C++ / PHP if I use any web backend stuff
– or just PHP if I do a multiplayer web game
– dev under OS X and port to windows

Tools:
– iPad with MultiTrack for recording audio clips and sound effects
– the gimp for graphics stuffs
– maybe modplug tracker for music
– sfxr if I need blips and beeps

Them’s the plans! I may do an iOS game if it’s the right theme. I think I might be leaning towards doing something with AS3, maybe I should spend friday learning it a bit in advance so I’m not scrambling to get my skills together.

-Phil

Hey, been working on this game since .. the start! It’s Nobody Wants Kitty about a lonely sad kitty who doesn’t have much going for her. She’s got to upgrade herself until someone will finally want her. You start out as a pathetic cat with rabies, mange, a missing eye, a missing ear, no whiskers, and no fur.

I’m using flashpunk and that’s been working pretty well. Using flash is nice because distribution is so super simple

-Phil

Well, after a day of working at it, the game is now working! I’ve got the full experience from start to finish now. Todo tomorrow:

- title screen
- win screen
- in game timer, text hints
- music, sfx

I’m pretty happy with how it came out

-Phil

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 10:55 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.

Hey, y’all!

Go and check it out! Here’s the original entry.

Also, here’s my Christmas card to you!

Thanks again for joining in LD22!!! Have a great holiday!

-Phil

Tags: christmas

Ahoy there, anonymous gift sender – thanks for the Christmas gift exchange gifts They actually came in a few weeks ago, but I was at GDC, so I forgot to post for a bit!

Gift included:
– Swell Mega-Stein
– German Gaming Magazine
– A festive snack!

Unfortunately the gift I sent was “returned to sender”

-Phil

Ahoy there, you might recall my October Challenge game “Anathema Mines” which is a remake of an old LD#6 entry.

I’ve written a blog post about the original LD#6 entry. The re-make I was doing in October is coming out in mid-May, you can see the trailer here.

Cheers!
-Phil

Man, I managed to bore myself to death with this game.

Soooo .. I’m going to scrap that game and do something simple and silly instead

-Phil

Ahoy there, thanks so much for joining in the 10th Anniversary Ludum Dare! I gotta say, it was an amazing experience to see all 1400+ entries being submitted to the site!

The judging is pretty much the same as always. You judge entries, people judge you.

The big change this year is that now those who judge more entries will get more people judging their entry. I recommend starting judging a few entries now and keep judging them throughout the next three weeks to ensure your entry gets a good handful of ratings. Try to judge AT LEAST 25 entries. Please note that stuffing fake ratings is 100% uncool.

Also, coolness has changed: 50 ratings gets you bronze. 75 gets you silver. 100 gets you gold. Above that, you’re just awesome Be sure to make a post about your favorite entries to highlight the best-of-the-best!

Lastly, if you attempt to play an entry, but can’t, please just leave a comment to the user stating that you can’t judge their entry and explain why. “I don’t have a Mac” or “I can’t install Java” or whatever are all fine reasons. It will help them know how to create an entry that even more people can play next time!

Cheers!
-Phil

My October Challenge 2011 game is finally done! I guess I took longer than a month to finish it

Anyway, check it out

If you want to know the whole dev history (how it took 4 game jams to make this game You can check out my dev blog.

Anyway, have fun!
-Phil

I just drew a sketch of one of MY favorite villains .. Snidely Whiplash!

May it inspire you!

-Phil

I’ve got all my villains now! Now onto weapons and stuff …

-Phil