Um, sort of, anyway. 23 and half hours. Close enough. I have a playable demo of my game! Yay!

The main character is the grumpy one.

What do you think of my interpretation of “beneath the surface”?

Tags: demo

I’ve got a puzzle! And, this may not sound like much to you, but… I think it’s actually a good puzzle! I’ve never made a good puzzle before, but this one’s good! Hooraaayyyy! Try it out immediately!

How puzzling!

Also, level 1 is designed for messing around and getting used to the controls. Try playing it for a bit!

I really like my game this time. It’s a puzzle platformer – give it a try!

Ta-daa!

Here’s a poster I made for a movie adaptation of my Ludum Dare 27 game, Jackton Factory. Of course, I have no plans to actually make this movie, but making the poster was pretty fun. I plan to include it in Spanner in the Works.

How did they stretch 10 seconds into a feature-length film? Were there 700 characters?

On the subject of SitW, development is going pretty well. I ran into coder’s block for a couple of weeks, but I am very much back in action now. I’m currently working on making a level editor, which will be useful for me (Tiled is definitely not ideal for this game’s purposes!) and allow me to add Steam Workshop support. Eventually. Only time will tell if I’ll continue to run into inspiration problems for such long periods of time throughout the development process – I sure hope not.

Tags: jackton factory, LD27, spanner in the works

Looking at some past LD’s, the I’m In posts probably won’t start naturally for several more days. I’m going to see if that’s because a lot of people don’t start visiting the website until close to LD or because they’d rather write their post when there are other people writing theirs by seeing if this post triggers an early start for the flow of “I’m in”s. It’s not a perfect experiment, but we’ll see what happens.

Anyway, this is my, what? Eighth LD? Wow, it is. I’ve participated in every single LD since #23, I wouldn’t miss one for anything. Almost. I guess I’d miss one for a million dollars, or for immortality, as long as it comes with eternal youth and health and a guarantee that humans won’t blow themselves up and leave me all alone. But I’m probably not going to be offered either of those things in the next 20 days.

Here are the tools I’ll be using:

• Platform: Haxe with OpenFL yet again! I just don’t see how anything could be better. I like the language, it runs well on all of the platforms I export to and a lot of ones I don’t, and it’s got good libraries. Such as…
• Engine: HaxePunk. HaxePunk has served me excellently in the past, and I’m actually making Spanner in the Works, my first large-scale game, with it, which has vector graphics. Go figure!
• Sprite editor: Aseprite. Buy the $10 version. The only reason I didn’t is because I’m a cheapskate. You don’t want to be like me, do you?
• Tilesetting: GoTile. I made this one! Whoopee! It’s totally free and stuff. Go get it, it’s sort of like AutoTileGen if it had been made in 2 days.
• Text editor: Sublime Text 2. You know, this list is starting to look suspiciously… identical… to the one I posted last Ludum Dare.
• Timelapse: gLapse again. But this time, I’ll turn the quality up higher. My last timelapse looked, well, disgusting. Because that’s what JPEG artifacts look like! Disgusting! Blech.
• Streaming: Not doing it this time. Nope.
• Sound: jfxr, made by our own Frozen Fractal and announced in the post right before this one! Let’s give him a round of applause for bringing us the third generation of Ludum Dare low-tech sound synthesizer software that really blows away both of the previous ones. Oh, and I’ll also possibly use Audacity. And maybe even LMMS, if I’m feeling bold.

So, best of luck to everyone! I don’t expect to get another medal (certainly not another gold one), but I do expect this to be a lot of fun, because that’s what prior experience would suggest. I’ll have to start going to bed at midnight and getting up at 8 a.m. by then, though, because going to bed at 1:30 a.m. and getting up at 11 won’t work for several reasons. So, let’s all make some games! (In 20 days.) Wahoo!

Tags: im in

There’s no goal to the game yet, but the first signs of my main mechanic are beginning to show. Click the screenshot to try it!

AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

…but I’m just not feeling it this LD. I always look forward to this 359 days each year. I’ve participated in every Ludum Dare since LD23. I’ve loved it every time. Except this one.

I’ve got a pretty good idea. You play as an evil spirit who needs to collect souls by possessing inanimate objects and getting people to attack each other with them. But I find that I really don’t feel like making it. I feel like having a relaxing weekend, trying some games on my new PC, stuff like that. And I guess I’m not surprised. The past three weeks at least – probably more – have been really busy and really exhausting for me, and, until next weekend, there isn’t an opportunity for relief in sight.

The only reason I haven’t decided to call it quits is because I would then me doomed forever to say “I’ve participated in every LD since LD23 except for one.” I hate disclaimers like that. I guess I’ll spend the rest of today relaxing and hopefully I’ll have an idea both fun and possible to make in one day.

I’ve never had to censor spoilers in one of my creations before. I feel proud.

So, after getting off to an extraordinarily rocky start, I’ve got something going with jQuery, of all things! It’s got a sort of weird story unfolding. I don’t have it all completely figured out. I’m not sure if it will even be possible to get the whole story in a single playthrough.

I’ve never done anything even remotely like this in almost any way before, so I’m going to need some feedback on whether there’s anything I’m doing horribly wrong. After that, though, I’ve got a whole day to do nothing but write. That’s a lot of time, as long as I don’t go too crazy with the branching dialogue trees! Oh, and there’s also adding sound and music. But mostly just writing.

So, yeah. Play it by clicking this little link or the big image above, which is also a link. By the way, when you get to the part about police, the first two dialogue options don’t work because I haven’t written them yet. Go with the one that doesn’t say “Alright.”

Tags: first prototype, game prototype, prototype