My first LD48 and I think it’s gone very well! I’ve been timelapsing with chronolapse and it’s been working very well. I made and uploaded a video of my progress at about 1 am last night, so 23 hours in. Viewable on youtube! Since I finished game mechanics pretty much completely last night I’ve done some work on sound today (music with audiotool.com and sound effects with bfxr.net) and I’m about to get to work on the remaining graphics. I’m pretty happy with my entry so far, and I’ve been really enjoying idling in the #ludumdare irc channel and trying out all the different games people link for critique. Can’t wait to play all the finished games!

My entry is at http://www.tomcorke.com/ludumdare/escape/ and I’m working on it live – if it isn’t working when you load it just wait a minute and refresh, I test immediately after changes and fix them just as quick!

I’d appreciate any reports of bugs or issues, idling in #ludumdare on Afternet as “Shot”.

Just adding finishing touches to my game, namely terrain graphics – the biggest thing that’s always on the screen has just been a white box until now. No sweat, I’ve got this.

I’m currently attempting to submit my entry for LD21 and thought I’d share some of the steps along the way with screenshots (from timelapse archive, <3 chronolapse).

No better way to start than a title screen:

I then got stuck straight into the concept I had for “escape” – solving puzzles to move up levels of a tower/dungeon to escape rising lava levels, with a snakes and ladders like “fall down 3 levels” mechanic if you got something wrong. First up, an indicator on the screen for your level and the level of the lava!

It wasn’t long before I scrapped that idea as I couldn’t think of how to implement a nice variety of puzzles that could increase in difficulty while being randomly generated (admittedly, I didn’t give the problem a lot of thought) and started work on my second idea, a side scrolling platformer where you outrun an advancing lava wave! I jumped into photoshop and threw together some concept art for the platforms you could run and jump along.

It became quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be much room for variety in level generation, and with tile designs like that it looked entirely possible to fall down a gap between tiles just by offsetting vertically. I could have worked on a more solid tile design, but instead I decided to forego graphics for the time being and get to work on random terrain generation, rendered as solid white for now, with a little red rectangle for the player! The “minimap” appeared and stuck with the game mostly unchanged all the way through.

Some time spent looking at a friend’s progress:

And back to my own work. Making quick progress now, I added a lava wall behind you and blue obstacle blocks floating in the air. At this stage I was intending to have the blue blocks as indestructable objects which were a lot less common than they are now and intended to have a seperate type of creature you would have to shoot and kill as you progressed across the world.

Next on the agenda was meteors raining from the sky! Rendered as simple circles themselves they were very uninteresting to have falling across the screen, so I added smoke particles trailing behind them. These were supposed to grow in size and lose opacity so they’d become invisible and be destroyed when they were completely unseen. It didn’t work as intended at first and there was amusement when they added to my lava wall and started covering the screen with “smoke”. It made the game much harder to play, and because they never despawned the game went slower and slower! Glad I got screenshots to remember it.

Smoke particles fixed and tested against different coloured backgrounds, the game was coming together nicely now – it needed an end condition though. I quickly made an image for failure and added it to the game. Also added a distance text at this point, so you could see how far you were getting!

Time for some more fancy graphics – cue the Lava Tsunami of Doom, for which the game will be applauded and named. Also added 2 background layers which scroll at different speeds.

The game was still lacking something while playing though, so I figured I should add some sounds. Audiotool.com for background “music” and bfxr.net for sound effects. Pow!

And then with everything else done, graphics for the rest of the game!

And that’s that!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=5019

The question mark makes it a very different title, I think. Am I alone? Probably not..

story =

sandwich shop
staff:
you
griller
assembler
order taker

griller gets sick, goes home
assembler abducted by aliens
order taker runs away with mystery man for shotgun wedding

LEFT ALONE

SERVE THE CUSTOMERS

customers come in and give orders, queue builds

customers give orders in text, generic voices.
orders in speech bubbles
have icons for elements of sandwiches

to prevent straight “Build sandwich for customer A, deliver, build for B, deliver, build for C, deliver”:
toasted sandwiches, require toasting time once done
bacon, sausage, burger, steak, grilled chicken, fried onion – all require cooking time
don’t burn these things or you can’t use them!

grid/selection of ingredients
breads seperate, even necessary?
click an ingredient
hotkeys for sandwich slots! (clicking optional)

click ingredient, press hotkey for sandwich slot
click sandwich, click toaster
click sandwich, click customer, cha-ching
click ingredient, click grill
click ingredient on grill, hotkey sandwich!
click sandwich on toaster, click customer, cha-ching

double-wide customers for added difficulty, lololol

customers pay based on time delivered – they have an expected time based on ingredients and give bonus for faster than expected, deduct for slower

constant clock ticking, day ends, score is your cash in till. scoreboard!

Now if someone else rips me off, I have something to refer to. Not that it matters. By this time into LD21 I had a firm idea, a working concept prototype and no alcohol in my body. This time, I had 3/4 of a bottle of Jack Daniels in my system and am noticeably less productive. Oh well!

For LD22 I’ve spent a lot more time drinking and lot less time coding than I did for LD21, but I do have a pretty solid idea now, thanks to the input of my lovely wife <3

I've decided to code this project in lua using love2d, something I haven't used before but seems pretty solid. I saw a good number of entries in the last LD using it, and I've used lua plenty in World of Warcraft addon development – easily enough to be very familiar with syntax and common functions. The Love2d framework syntax is simple and shouldn't be a problem, and I'm looking forward to getting to work. Now though, i've had far too much Jack Daniels to be productive and am spending my time listening to music and watching IRC, commenting on the progress of others. I should get some sleep and get up tomorrow to work on the project.

Fun times all round, good luck to all, sleep approaches!