I’ve made some good progress over the last hours. Please pardon my virtually non-existent art skills.Landscape is destructible, fuel tanks spawn debries which itself causes more explosions. Target: Kill the President of this mostly harmless planet with only one Bomb. Dunno if this will ever evolve into something fun. But it’s definitely playable

Had I known how much fun LD ist, this would be my 28th, not my first.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 14th, 2013 at 7:48 am and is filed under LD #28. 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.

After doing better than expected during LD28, I hope to place even better this time.

I will most likely use phaser.io as my framework, GrafX2 and Gimp for all the pixel “art” I’ll have to make and sfxr and llms for sound and music. Depending on the theme I might deviate from that a bit though.

I hope it will be as much fun as last time!

Update, strike that. I’ll be using löve2d 0.8.0 (why not 0.9.1 you ask? Because the new versions are not yet available on most Linux distribution’s vanilla stable versions. Sad but true.) and probably parts of the following lua libraries:

• https://github.com/rnlf/lust (my own collection of tools and some higher level stuff)
• https://github.com/rxi/lume (rxi’s great tool collection)
• https://github.com/rxi/flux (rxi’s equally great tweening library)

For graphics, I’ll probably switch to Gimp after all.

Less than a day until LD29. Excited \o/

Third LD for me. I wanted to use phaser but since I ran out of time getting some experience with it, I will just use löve again.

So, löve with rxi’s great libraries (classic, lume, flux and probably lovebird and lurker), my own dump-everything-into library (https://github.com/rnlf/lust) and probably HardonCollider for the code, gimp and probably blender for visuals, tiled for tilemaps (if applicable), jfxr for sound and blipseq and/or LMMS for music.

Really looking forward to this!

I’ll be participating for the 4th time (in a row) on this LD, my first anniversary

This time I figured I should be more prepared than the last three times and so I extracted a reusable code base from the code of my last three entries. The usual stuff that one tends to rewrites verbatim each time. So for the first time I will actually be able to write a game in 48 hours, not an engine on the first day and a game on the second day

I’ll be using löve2d, like I did the last two times. I make my graphics with Gimp and probably (read: unlikely) Blender. I write my code with Vim on Linux and make sound with LMMS, jfxr and whatever else I might find useful.

You can find my basecode here: https://bitbucket.org/rnlf/lust. It is mostly undocumented and in some places unnecessarily complex, so use it on your own risk if you really want to

So, it’s just under seven hours until the compo starts. I hope “Whole Game in One Screen” will not be the theme. I think I make something for all the other options.

See you all on the other side, good look, have fun!

Look! The first screenshot of my LD31 game. I’m aiming for high mood scores, I hope I’ll achieve that goal!

So much work still to do. But at least it looks like a game already:

Click to enlarge

My game is done, look:

Hey guys,

because I hate doing the theme slaughter on my notebook without a mouse, I decided to write a small shell script that allows me to do it from the command line. I thought I’d share it with you: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/195907563/slaughter.sh.

The script runs on Linux and MacOS X (most likely also on Cygwin and BSD, but I have not tested it on those, please let me know if it works for you).

But use the script at your own risk, I am relatively sure it cannot be exploited by malicious theme names, but I cannot guarantee it 😉

Also, I am not entirely sure whether the votes are actually counted, because as far as I know there are some safeguards against votebots in the slaughter backend. I keep using it myself though 😉

Have a screenshot:

The terms conventional weapons or conventional arms generally refer to weapons that are in relatively wide use that are not weapons of mass destruction (e.g.nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons).

So, here’s the deal: You are an operative specialist in blowing up super villains’ secret hideouts using… well… an unconventional weapon by the above definition. So you carry a nuke into the volcano base and then get the hell outta there. Of course this bomb is too heavy to allow for a sidearm of any kind.

This is what it looks like at the moment:

Yes, I know, very impressive, but please, no applause!

I spent most of today creating my tileset and the level. Both are done now \o/

Many platformers feature lava, but this game takes place in a volcanic hideout, so in this game, it’s actually legit:

Next, I will finally focus on code for a while. At the moment, there is not much you can (not even die), besides running around. Wow, best game ever, 10/10.

Once I have the basic gameplay done, I will try to make a player sprite that is worthy of my sweet tiles. I am very amazed they turned out so nice. Very happy, indeed.

So tired, but here’s a game!

Some would call it a “Post Compo Release” and in fact, that’s what it is. Many people seemed to have trouble with the extremely high difficulty level and some other annoyances in the game, so I simplified some of the really hard jumps, added more script sequences that guide you on the right way if you wander off in the wrong direction and made the guards less annoying. I also more than doubled the number of checkpoints along the way, so if you make a mistake, you don’t have to start all over!

The post compo release is linked from the entry page of the game.

I’ve played a lot of games that use Z as (one of) their action keys. For someone using a standard US keyboard layout, this might be surprising to you, but this key is not necessarily in the bottom left corner on your player’s keyboard. As long as you only use one action key, that is okay, because even if the player has to put his finger onto the center of the top row of his keyboard, most should be able to manage that.

But, consider you have two action keys, say “Jump” and “Fire” and you chose to use Z and X for that. Now this is very uncomfortable for everyone with a French, German or alternative Italian keyboard layout, where the Z key is in the top row of keys (and for the German layout it is even moved to the center of the top row, which is almost impossible to use).

Of course, I can just change my keyboard layout to US and that’s it, but not every player has the knowledge or the will to do that and you don’t want to limit the number of people who would be able to easily play your game, right? After all, there are about 2800 other games to chose from, you want to make it easy for your players.

So, which keys should you use? Take a look at this chart:

This is the ISO recommendation for Latin keyboard layouts. The black keys should be fixed on all standard layouts (i.e. not on Dvorak, Neo or de-ergo or Bépo layouts, but I think those are rare enough and their users should be used to changing their layouts regularly). What we can also see is that WASD as direction keys is not necessarily a good idea. It works on US and DE layouts, but everyone with a French layout gets in trouble with that.

So what should you use? In practice, XCVB for action keys has been used a lot and seems to work on many keyboards without Ghosting (another thing to keep in mind) and there are lots of gamers out there who prefer ESDF movement keys, so it should work quite well in practice.

Another thing: Some layouts (like French) can use digit keys only with shift, so better don’t use numerals for important actions.

The best solution would of course be to have configurable keys, but especially in a 48h contest, you will hardly have enough time to add that. I did it in my LD31 entry though and got a bit of praise for that, so maybe it’s a good idea to do if you want to squeeze the last bit out of your Overall score. Whatever you do, consider making it easy for non QWERTY keyboard users. Thanks for your attention 😉

So, this LD is finished, see you all in August! This was my fifth Ludum Dare and it was exactly my median overall result. So I think it’s probably representative.

As you can see, I should not have tried to use a “smart” trick to prevent coming up with a great interpretation of the theme.

Hey fellow ludumdarers,

I spent the last six or seven month rewriting Löve2D for emscripten and thus the Web (or at least, WebGL enabled browsers). It is not complete, but my LD32 entry runs smoothly in it (in some browsers). I thought you might be interested. You can find it here.

Let me know what you think!

I made this little command line tool for LD32 and just verified that it still works for the current slaughter.

If you want to use it, here’s the original post

Have fun!

Done

Okay,

I was preparing and advanced base code, with some 2.5D rendering. It’s not finished, so I’ll have to spend some time during LD on fixing it, but that’ll be even more fun!

You can find it here: https://github.com/rnlf/blender_game_tools

I will also use my old base code https://github.com/rnlf/lust as well as some other open source libraries.

Have fun, everybody!

Enemies would be boring if they were unable to harm us, right?

Graphics Scene almost done! Just a few details are missing, then I can start rendering all the small animations I’ll need.