This will be the first time I participate so I’m probably gonna take it easy, I will be using my own codebase that is publicly available on Google Code

Graphics will be done in GraphicsGale and sound with BFXR and coding with Eclipse. The game will be a HTML5/JavaScript game and I will try to keep away from using any AJAX calls so that I can zip the thing for local usage!

less than an hour left for the theme announcement, getting really psyched and thought I should share my workspace with ye folks as it seems to be somewhat a tradition by lookin’ at the posts! Lot’s of dust badgers floatin’ around, does wonders with ones inspiration! And look on the Eee, there’s a little kitten there! I will of course add a little kitten easter egg somewhere in the game! I freekin’ love kittens!!! <3 Anyways, here’s my workspace:

Great theme to do a quick game with! Here’s the finished result!

hehe just joking! Anyway, the initial class is setup and ready to go! Now I just need to figure out what to do with this theme, It must include a lot of madness, maybe mind tentacles from beyond! Something Lovecraftian perhaps? Anyway, I will take my time to ponder on the initial idea and go full out when I get something off of it! Good luck fellow competitors!

Finally I think I have the basic game idea thought out, the setting will be Lovecraftian as told by my last post, and it’s based on one of my absolute favorite stories, “The Whisperer in Darkness” where a eremite scholar is defending himself from creatures beyond the stars with the help of his dogs and rifle.

The game will be based on the Battleship game mechanic, you’ll try shooting down the blasphemous creatures by luck choosing tiles from a gameboard. At the same time you must keep from shooting your dogs, at all time you’ll have one dog on the game board, where he is is a mystery, so it all comes down to luck. If you kill your dog you’ll have to put out another from your kennel and continue finding the Mi-Goos, on some tiles there will be treasures or artifacts from the aliens that you can trade in for money between game sessions, with the money you’ll be able to purchase new dogs and ammo.

To make the game a little bit less static you will also have a limited supply of grenades, these buggers will clear more tiles with one shoot but you’ll have a greater chance to hit your dog as well. When you’ve cleared a certain amount of tiles a Mi-Go will catch your dog, so you’ll have to send out a new one, I don’t really know the amount of rounds to use on this one, but it’s all about final balancing!

Anyway, the plan now is to get the mechanic and basic states of the game fixed in code, after that I can put time on gfx and sound and start to polish the game for final release! Pretty straight forward So no sketches and notes to show right now, but it will come!

Time for a quick dev update, I’ve gotten my stomach filled and my laundry washed, but that had nothing to do with the game right?

Well for the game I have finished the board randomizer that will randomly position the Mi-go’s, Men (= More treasure but don’t have to be killed to finished the level) and the Dawg! so that each time you play all the elements are at different positions, it can’t get more basic than that when it comes to game mechanics right? Anyway, here’s a shoot, not much to look at right now, I will finish the game code t’day so that I have all day t’morrow to fix with graphics and audio! And hopefully I’ll get some hours for that t’day as well.

Now it’s time to get the shotgun and grenade features working! Cheerioz folks!

So now we’re more than halfway into the comp, things are going as planed here. I would like to finish the ingame gfx t’day but I think it’s time to take a nap and get back to it t’morrow, got a good feeling with this game, it starts to feel pretty nice and it’s a little bit fun already. I need to balance it up better when I got the gfx finished, but I think I’m on to something here. Anyway, here’s the Day 1 screenshot!

Not much dev time left till the finish line, and it feels like I have a #¤&!-load more to do! I’m starting to get confident about the in-game now though, the graphics are pretty much finished, and almost all the features are implemented, now I need to fix gfx for the title-screen, the shop and the difficulty setting screen, and a nice little game over label. I’m going away to dinner now and after that I’ll try to plan up the finish sprint as good as I can, still haven’t got any sound in the game, something I need to put time on. Anyway, here’s a screen of the in-game as it looks now!

Just submitted my entry to the compo challenge! Was a rough time the last hours, and I had to cut out some features to get it done in time. Still, I’m pretty happy with the result being my first timer and all! I managed to squeeze in a lot of pixels and some sound as well! The game needs something more to get it’s fun factor up, but I can’t change that now, it’s a game nevertheless! Anyway, here’s a screen shot of the title screen to round off this edition of LD48 for my part!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8409

LD37 isn’t starting until 03.00AM Saturday here in Sweden, so me and my buddies are putting down some time to get prepared for t’morrow at the locale we’ll be spending the weekend in.

I’ve been working a couple of weeks on the game engine that I will use for this jam, so hopefully it’ll be light on bugs and have the features I need for the challenge at hand.

Last LD I attended was 22, so it’s almost 5 years to the date since my last jam.

Not much more to rant about right now, so I’ll continue my gamepad implementation, hopefully I’ll be a bit better at updating the blog during the jam.

Cheerioz!

Tags: pre-jam update

So we’re 6h into the jam, we had to squeeze a pizza into that time, and a visit to the grocery store to get some energy rich goodies. But now we’re in full speed again. I will do an status update for myself, and my buddies Emil and Roland, me and Emil will share some screens, but Roland will pass this time around as he want’s some more meat on the game before sharing.

Glenn update:

I’ve started to get basic movement down for player (keyboard and mouse controls for now) and a simple seek AI for the enemy. I also have the projectiles from the player, and they collide with the enemy. Up next is to get some health logic on both enemy and player, as well as projectiles from the enemies. After this I will work some on spawn logic for the enemies and after that I’ll do a basic graphics pass so that the game is ready for next level. Here’s a screenshot of the very early game:

Emil update:

“Amazing stuffs… Noo, don’t write anything” says Emil, well, he got a murky shadow mist thingamajig going on, of Dooooom!

Roland update:

“Life sucks, uhhh, I don’t know, this is hell” Says Roland. Hehe, he seems to enjoy himself at least!

That’s all for the 6h report, hopefully we’ll have some perdier shots to share next time around, and more nfo from the guys! Hope you’re having a good jam thus far! Cheerioz!

Things are going smoothly at the Östersund office, Rolle and Emil is going head ways with the basic mechanics, and we’re pretty much getting into the graphics parts of things soon.

I just got the game to a state where it’s somewhat playable and ready for a alpha release to the public, so I pushed it up to my gitpages for everyone to try out. If you’re interested, check it out on: LD37: The Murder Pit – Alpha 1

Tags: alpha. release, LD37

Finally got the game submitted to the Compo! It’s been an awesome round, I’m a bit unimpressed on my asset creation, but compared to the last compo I attended, the game is much more fun to play, so I see that as a win. Will write a post-mortem on this and think about how next compo can be handled in better ways. Until then I’m looking forward to test and rate when it goes live!

The game can be played on my entry page: The Murder Room

Fourth time LD participant, this will be the third one in a row this time around though. Looking forward to the theme announcement, working from Östersund, Sweden, so the theme will be announced around 03.00 local time, will start t'morrow around 09.00.

This time we're at "Mina Bästa Polare" here in town, here's a picture of my workspace :)

Good luck out there and see you in the trenches.

Just finished the design doc for the game, it'll be a mad max inspired resource driven survival turn-based rpg! (that's a mouthful for sure).

The graphics will be super simple this time around, aiming for a 160x120 base that I will scale up x4 to get a retro feel.

I'm aiming to make it a 10 level game with a defined start and finish, but right now anything can happen. I'll start by making super simple placeholder graphics so that I can start with implementing the basic mechanics, and then take it from there!

I'll try to be a bit more active on the blog this time around. And here's an image of the legendary design doc

Cheerz!

We're approx. 4 hours into the jam (started at 09.00 here in sweden, 6 hours after the theme announcement), and I've finally started writing some initial code for the game.

I'm using the phaser HTML5 game lib this time around, I want to be able to give graphics and sound some more love, so using a game lib with good support for what I want to accomplish is really nice.

The game will be Mad Max inspired, you will have gasoline as the main resource, and go through a series of levels to reach your goal which will be a gasoline refinery (just like in mad max 2). You will start out with 6 vehicles, 2 cars, 2 motorbikes and a big-ass truck. They will have their pros and cons which will work better or worse depending on the level you engage. You will be able to loot smaller amounts of gas on the levels, and you will have the choice to scout a level before hand so that you choose the right setup of vehicles to tackle the next level (this also costs gas).

You need to be careful not to spend to much gas, or you'll dry out before reaching the refinery, but you also need to have enough vehicles on a given level to not loose out right on the spot.

Hopefully I can make the mechanics balanced and fun in the end.

Here's the WIP title screen of the game in pixelated glory!

Now into grinding some more code! Cheerioz!

Starting to tick in to the end of day one here in Östersund, we ate a really fatty burger a couple of hours ago, and it starts to get to us in all the bad ways, but we'll continue for at least a couple of hours more.

Here's a shot of our general setup over at "Mina Bästa Polare", that is Pontus(@khorm) workplace, on the left you can see Emil(@emil-sunesson), hacking away at his space arcade game, and handling the playlist (currently playing "The Kristet Utseende").

The game is getting along slowly, I've managed to fix the vehicle selection state and the entry to the actual level state, now I just need to implement the main mechanics and get some enemy units in there, I'm a bit unsure if I'll be able to fix the whole base today, but hopeful I'll have a good base to work on by tomorrow.

That's all from Östersund for now, Over and Out!

Heya! A quick update to start off day 2 of the jam.

I didn't manage to get as far as I wanted yesterday, I wanted to have the core mechanics of the game up and running before tuning out, so that I could concentrate on the squishies t'day (music, graphics and content creation). But alas I need to get some of the basics done some more, will try to get something up and running by lunchtime, and then do 1h of music and sound before I go into the last stage of polish.

I thought maybe this was a good time to list the tools I use for the jam as well.

Graphics: Photoshop CC + Wacom Intuos Pro Small

Music: Ableton Live 9 Studio + AKAI LPK25

Sound: SFXR

Code: Atom.io

Language: JavaScript

Lib: Phaser

And here's a shot of the morning scene here in Östersund, coffee and Swedish snuff is on the menu as you can see

Mornin', Evenin' or g'd afternoon survivors! There's been a couple of days since our game CARnage got released to grace the wild plains of LD space, the whole team has been a bit jet-lagged and dazed. But in good health (unless you count in all the unhealthy foodstuffs our bodies need to process after the weekend).

But now the time has come to give a more public announcement for our creation, CARnage! We're mighty proud of this release, and it's the first one that the core team of the LD Östersund meet-up has done as a whole (previously we've been hacking at the compo, or as 2 man teams). So this was really an experience for us, and a good one at that! We've already started to plan for LD41, and all of us are totally psyched for it!

But back to the pressing matter of LD40. I want to present to the wider community our game, it's a carnage driven Micro-Machines/Carmageddon mash-up, with some sprinkles of RC Pro-AM and Death Rally/Race (add a pinch of Mad Max in the soup and we're good to go). Expect no mercy as the diesel driven machines of death roam through the wastelands on a quest of glory (and meat for sustenance). Here's CARnage:

:metal: JOIN THE CARNAGE :metal:

Now it's back to the trenches for me, I see you all out there in the wastelands! Oh, and a postmortem is planed to be released in the coming week, so keep ye peepers pealed!

It's finally published! It's been a hectic weekend, but we've had a load of fun, this time around we went about things a bit differently as we only had a team of 2 (lowest participation for the local jam meet-up since we started at LD37), me and @emil-sunesson decided to jam at our own homes for maximum comfort (The man-cave is a man-cave right?).

The setup was pretty simple, I made the graphics and sound fx, and Emil took on the cape of code guru, simple and effective. I had to do some code as well, but mostly cosmetic fix-ups for the UI and such. And I'm happy to say that we're both pretty proud with the result. Feels like a pretty tight game, albeit a simple one.

I did have grand visions on making a kick-ass soundtrack for the game, but I just didn't get in the groove, so we decided to decline to participate in the Audio category and went full force for making the gfx and game-play as polished as possible. You know how it is, at the start you have grand visions for the complete game, but as time goes by you'll need to kill your darlings one at a time, and that's ok, we've been doing jams for quite a while now, so we're pretty used with the darling killing.

Anyways, we've been super inactive on the social side of things (We usually have a @rolle for those stuff, and he was AFK this time, hope to have him on the team for LD43 :hearts:).

The :beer: consumption was a bit high this time around as well, and that shows in the game for sure, Me and Emil are the 2 players in the Östersund scene that consumes the alcoholic bewerages during the jams, so when it was only us two it kinda went overboard I guess, thus we christen the team "Can ò Beer Games".

Anyways, I hope we can give some entertainment to some people with our contribution to this round, and we'll be seeing you guys in the rating comments! Cheerios! :beers:

Play Raiders of the Lost Beer

I managed to snag a particularly nasty cold a few days after the jam concluded, and I'm now home from work feeling sorry for myself, but, I thought I would do one of them crazy gif captures to show of some action of our game at least, I play like a crow as we say in Sweden (not good), but it shows off some arsenal and power-ups at least.

We're hoping to get together and write a post-mortum soon as well, this event went pretty well we think, so we're already looking forward to LD43 when we hopefully will be a couple of more dudes on the team (would be gold with 2 coders, 1 gfx and 1 audio).

Anyway, here's the capture I promised, and you can test it out in the link bellow, will you be the one that pushes us above 20?! That would be kick-ass! :beers:

Play Raiders of the Lost Beer