This is my first time participating in a Ludum Dare Game Jam and I have been working with @RenegadePunisher to put together a prototype in which the zombies - which run at you - become part of the land - once you have killed them of course. Allowing you to climb on top of them, ultimately making your play area smaller, making you run out of space to play - as the camera is static.

This idea came to us after literally hours of thinking about and around the theme given, as we wanted to stick to the theme as closely as possible.

We have been using SDL and c++ in visual studio, using our own engine that is expanding as we require the extra utility.

Some main bugs currently are the Zombie's size as well as the collision clipping issues, however they are jobs for tomorrow, sleep has finally prevailed.

Currently there is no music or sound effects - yet another job for tomorrow, however the programming jobs going forth shouldn't be too massive, especially seeing as today was spent doing animations and programming character functionality.

And now for some well earned sleep.

Some collision issues solved so far as well as the addition of blood on top of the zombies. A couple of graphical changes and the zombies now explode upon death, making the eventual piles more maneuverable. Me and @renegadePunisher have been working for a fair few hours today, and are expecting to be working for a fair few more - just to get a game loop introduced. Everything else comes after that.

Now here's a gif:

Day 2 is now over for me and the team and more code has been written, more art has been faffed about with, and some more backgrounds have been produced.

Today's adjustments:

New character has replaced the old one,

The character and zombies have decreased in size by 20%,

The art has been gone around again to remove any issues that were arising with animations popping back and forth with a blue line around the edge,

A bullet has been added that can kill zombies upon impact,

Body parts are now flung across the screen whilst roating around their center,

Those body parts now are added to the walk able ground in their specific rotation to allow for mounds to be created,

Added jumping and control for the character,

Allowed for the character to jump up through layers of body parts - to prevent them from getting stuck, 

Added a new type of animation for the Zombie - this will be behind the fence in the main menu,

Added a new animation for the Zombie to climb over the fence - from the background to the foreground,

A lot of music has been listened to.

Things to do tomorrow:

Music and sound effects,

Main menu graphics and functionality,

Finalizing the game loop,

Publish the game to itch.io, 

Finalize the Zombie climbing over fence animation in the drawing order,

Add a helicopter to save our hero.

Here is an image from earlier today after around about 5 hours of work today:

And here is an image from just now, after about 15 hours of work today:

Some good work done today by me, @renegadePunisher and two artists who are not on this website.

We have yet to have many ideas for the name of the game so any suggestions would be kindly accepted.

Here is the link to the game so you can review our hard work over the past three days: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/$101554

The reason for the such a late publish is because we couldn't figure out how to make a stand along .exe file from visual studio, so we had to resort to uploading a .Zip folder.

If anyone knows how to make a stand alone .exe file a comment explaining how would be appreciated, thank you.

The game is available to play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/zombie-escape

Another reminder: The controls are on the home screen.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/zombie-escape

Been working on a game idea now for about two hours and we have come up with one, which actually took us a lot less time than our previous game. Here is how our design board is looking now:

Decided to go for a more unique idea of a game, not just your average plat-former, or fighting game - More of a puzzle game with an unique twist.

Will update when there is some game-play, until then, happy game-jamming.

Over the past 4, or so, hours, me and @renegadePunisher have been hard at work getting multiple pop-up screens to work on the one monitor used to play the game - so you can move your character between one and another. This functionality is not yet complete so I cannot show it to you yet, however, it will be done eventually.

We are fully aware that the graphics at this time are not the best, however they are tomorrow's job.

So far this has been a very challenging and complex programming task, but we both feel up to the challenge - so we will finish before the last hour (unlike last time in which we were working until the last possible second).

If you look close enough you may see a little fella falling off the screen at the bottom left - This is our sacrificial being. (All will become clear in the next update).

Till then: Good Game Jamming

So we have been working on our idea for a long while now and have only just come to the realization of the method we were taking makes completing the game development impossible. This is because it requires one layer being the top layer, to allow for clicking on screens and moving them.

However, in order for our characters to be visible, their layer would be needed to be on top. These two layers cannot be merged due to their individual natures.

So we had on our hands a nice case of Case 22.

UNTIL - @renegadepunisher came up with a work around. This work around will set us back a few hours, however it beats starting from scratch on an entirely new idea.

I guess that's how game dev go though.

Now doesn't that look interesting???

So, since our last setback almost made us quit the idea - we have made some fairly large progress.

First of all:

We have a Title Screen type thing with instructions.

Second of all:

We have each character doing their own individual characteristic, in the picture you can see the pickaxe one and the state where they are falling, as well as the king, of whom you need to save.

The characters can go from screen to screen by building bridges - Or the more cool option - You can drag the windows under a falling grunt to catch them midair!

The aim of the game is to get the king to the final castle (which is currently being filled in by the goal in the bottom right), Once you do this the remainder of your grunts will be trapped forever, but its a worthy sacrifice for their king to live.

This is the end of day two and we have a fair bit of work to do tomorrow, including more graphics and some bugs to do with the characters. (As well as the somewhat forgotten Music and SFX of the game).

But as you may have noticed, you can play this on your desktop, with the grunts falling in-front of your icons and task bar in the bottom.

Until the next update. Happy Game Jamming.

After 3 days of working, our game is complete and available on our itch.io page: https://player-two.itch.io/long-live-the-king

This game took some planning and programming to get the ideas finalized - as the mechanics of the game are extremely different to the overwhelming majority of games currently.

Our game began with humble beginnings - with the theme being announced and (of course) it was not one that we were hoping for (but that's how game jam go i guess).

Me and @renegadepunisher began drawing up ideas for a puzzle game in which you could have each of the characters going inbetween multiple windows - Mainly because of the programming individuality and difficulty that would come with it.

This is one of the earliest designs we came up with:

On this image you can clearly see what our plan was to do - Have screens that can move around the monitor, each with a different character in them, to solve a puzzle of some sort.

From here we began setting out to make the multiple screens working, where we had this progress:

However!

We soon discovered that the approach towards moving the screens was majorly flawed, making the entire design impossible to actually make.

This is the point that were at when we almost decided to quit the principle and move onto another idea entirely:

This was until @renegadepunisher came up with a new way to avoid our previous Catch 22 Scenario.

This set us back a few hours but allowed us to continue down our original path and design.

And it also allowed us to sleep that night.

Then we worked through day 2 to get us to a fairly good position game play wise, however we didn't take any screen shots during that day, but throughout day 3 we worked to patch any bugs and added a winch to free the king.

Here are some final screenshots:

This last image is a drawing we had towards the end of day 2 to summarize our ideas into one.

To conclude, please play our game we worked tirelessly on it.

Here is a quick seek preview of our game if you haven't seen it already:

Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/long-live-the-king