It’s my last occasion to join before I start college so why not. I’ve created small games before but nothing major. I’m more of a web creator so this will be a fun new experience. I’ll be using:

• Programming: Java (vanilla)
• IDE: Eclipse
• Sound: Audacity, SFXR, Otomata, Circuli, Nudge
• Graphics: Paint.NET, Photoshop

I’ll be streaming the whole thing here (high res + cam + music): twitch.tv/lsrpnet

I’m staring the stream at around 7pm GMT-4 (New York). The stream will be partially Polish and partially English. I will simply respond in the language that you’ve asked the question in and I’ll “narrate” what I’m doing in the language that the majority of the viewers speak. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions – I enjoy answering! Also I might get couple of people on Teamspeak for a while and brain storm.

My Git: click

Good luck to all of you other fellow artists. Have fun!

After about 5 hours of work I have somewhat of an engine done. I got my sprites, sprite sheets, tiles, tile maps, ticks, renders, all that fun stuff under control.

The idea of the game is fairly simple and is based around controlling a colony of ants. You start off with a group of couple of ants and your goal is to breed and feed them to grow and expand the nest. I plan on doing random events like a human trying to destroy it (so you need to hide the queen deep), resources underground, random predator attacks and whatever else I have the time for.

Currently I’m going to bad with the thought of waking up in 4 hours to take a practice AP Chem exam (people living in US know how much pain that is …).

Anyways, here’s my really short time elapse of tonight:

G’day my fellow creators. So a week and an hour after LD48 compo has ended it’s time for me to reflect on my performance.

Gameplay

I’ve created a 2D adventure game with a pretty simple goal but a lot of micro management. You start off with a group of ants and your goal is to build your nest on the surface of the ground. To do this you need to collect dirt and sticks from underneath the ground. There’s also a survival factor because you need to collect food or else your ants will slowly die off. There are 4 different types of ants and each has its own task to perform.

• worker (blue) – dig and collect dirt
• builder (orange) – are able to create blocks from the collected dirt and sticks
• queen (white) – allows you to mate ants and expand
• fighter (red) – currently no use

When the game starts you have 3 of each type and 1 queen. The basic expectation is to create 3 groups of 3 and send two groups exploring to the two different sides of the world (since you start in the middle), leaving the third group and the queen closer to the surface to build once resources are collected. In the Ludum Dare version, the game ends when 50 ant-made blocks are placed on the surface in the dedicated area. There’s also a 20 minute timer but it doesn’t do anything except running down.

Mechanics/Keys

From the comments I’ve received during the past week I see that mechanics have a pretty hard learning curve. There are 5 types of actions (shown in the GUI on the left side) and you switch between them by pressing numbers [1-5]. Any kind of action requires you to select ants (pick action [1] and left click on an ant [LMB]). Then you pick your action between 2 and 5 and left click to perform. You move selected ants with [WSAD] and move the camera by holding [SHIFT] or [RMB] and pressing [WSAD]. Here are all the key strokes:

• [WSAD] – movement of the selected ants
• [1-5] – switching actions (shown in the GUI on the left)
• [SHIFT + WSAD] or [RMB + WSAD] – moving the camera
• [LMB] – performing an action

Sound/Graphics

There’s not much to it besides a couple of simple blips while picking up items and a very “soft” (and quite) digging sound. There’s also an ambient rain/thunderstorm sound and a very simple but in my opinion cool addition is that the deeper you go (with your camera) the quitter this sounds gets.

The graphics engine works off a pixel array and all art was made during those 48 hours. I’ve used Paint.NET and pretty much free handed all of it.

Download

Here’s a little website I’ve quickly made: http://anterraria.ls-rp.net/

Submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29770

And direct download: http://anterraria.ls-rp.net/Anterrarium.rar

Sorry that you have to download a .jar file. Apparently I can make a game in 48 hours but I can’t get an applet to work. (PS. Make sure you unpack the files and then run the game – you need the /res/ folder)

Screenshots

Timelapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvzufKYzuVQ

Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll take the time to rate my work

Hello fellow LudumDarers!

This is my second entry and I’m currently working on “Gravity Warrior” which is a side-scroller platform game. Your special, unconventional weapon is gravity or rather the fact that you can change it. You do not have any other weapons but your enemies do. The premise is that you change gravity to control the environment and therefor complete all the levels. An example of that would be switch horizontal component of the gravity after an enemy shoots a projectile at you to use that projectile to kill the enemy who shot it.

I’m programming in Java, using LibGDX for the first time in my life, as my goal for LD32 is to learn that library. I’m also using Box2D, Box2DLights and Tiled. Additionally, Garage Band and SFXR for my sound.

Here’s a first beta version of game (3 levels, no enemies, extremely bad movement): http://pliki.ls-rp.net/GW/

And a screenshot:

I wish you all luck and some sleep

I’m not participating this time, but I’ve come up with a game idea that someone might use.
Lately the “Rich Harrison” pasta meme has been popular, and I thought you can make a game parody of the show Pawn Stars.

The game would have 2 stages: buying in the shop and then selling on auctions.
The flow of the game would be as follow:

1. You start in the shop and random people come in with random items. I would make the items fake, funny and ancient (theme).
2. The objective is to negotiate with the sellers and try to buy at the lowest price. As a hurdle, people will come with fake (as in in-game fake) items that will later not sell so you have to watch out for those. You can also use experts as a helpline but they cost money. For each item you have actions like “buy at asking”, “negotiate down”, “reject”, “ask expert”, “bribe expert to low-ball”, etc.
3. Say there are 7 in-game days between auctions and you get 2-5 people show up every day at random. You buy and then at the end of the week you auction off what you bought.

In between buying and selling you can have exchanges between the 4 guys working there, but the main character you control is Rick Harrison. Basically the idea is to make a parody of the show. I played a random episode for myself and wrote down the first few lines I heard:
– I’m Rick Harrison, and this is my pawn shop. I work here with my old man and my son, Big Hoss. Everything in here has a story and a price. One thing I’ve learned after 21 years – you never know what is gonna come through that door.
– At my shop, family comes first and money comes second, depending on who you ask.
– Do you mind if I have someone look at it? I know a little bit about it. Just letting you know, he’s a little odd.
– So I brought a little touch of Jazz today for you. A signed picture and a handkerchif of Louis Armstrong.
– This is such a rare piece … I definitely want to get a few grand out of this.
– Have you ever had this authenticated by anybody?

It might be funny and cool, it might be boring and sad.
Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good luck everyone, have fun!