Ok, I lied. I am another new guy. But I’ve been meaning to enter a one of these for a while if that counts? No? Ah well.

So, my chosen poison for the competition is C++ with SFML, boost and box2D (if applicable) all through the power of Visual Studio 2010. I’d prefer another language if I’m honest, but I’m not familiar with them enough to justify diving head first into all the teething troubles when I have such a sort deadline. I’ll be showing off my amazing Photoshop art skills (a.k.a. quick doodles) and my incredable ability to press buttons in the ever popular sfxr. For music I’ll probably just see what I can throw together randomly at the end…

There could very well be some boiler plate code stolen from my current in development framework. Feel free to help yourself to it if you’re also crazy enough to be using C++, it’s open source for a reason.

I’ve entered a few similar competitions before, so with any luck I won’t make the rookie mistake of aiming too high, or indeed too low.
Anywho, that was me. Good luck to all.

I’ve spent my morning/early afternoon coding generic things that I’ll need whatever game I end up making. I also drew a ninja while trying to think of something.

The two ideas I’ve had is the (probably standard) possession/mind-control based game idea or a side-scrolling beat ’em up where you can only counter attack, Aikido style, possibly throwing them into another enemy in the process.

This theme doesn’t seem to be being as nice to me as I thought it might be.

After some back and forth with house mates and a walk to the shops to let the ideas settle. I have a plan.
Unfortunately my ninja isn’t going to be much use with this one.

It shall be called Illusion and will be all about tricking your enemies into killing themselves, each other or basically anything but you.

…I sure have been neglecting my community duties.

To make up for it, I give you “completed” gameplay. <linky>
You’ll need the VC++2010 redistrobutable to run it. Hopefully nothing else…

The aim of the game is to trick to enemies into killing themselves and each other.
If the enemy sees you he will move towards you and start firing, if you run out of his sight he will continue to move towards your last known location. While out of sight you can hold down space which will use some of your IP (illusion points) to turn you into a rock, the enemy will ignore this rock but if they walk into you or you get hit by a stray bullet, you still take damage.

The three circle in the top right are your available illusions. Clicking any one will stop the player being able to move, but will allow you to spawn one of your illusions where the cursor is pointing.

The top illusion is the cheapest and most basic. It makes a ghost-like clone of yourself. If the enemy sees this clone of you it will be tricked and begin firing at it. The bullets however will go straight through and hit whatever is behind the illusion, hopefully another enemy.

The middle illusion is a trick tile. It can make any tile look like a ground tile. For example, using it on the bottomless pit tiles (the black ones – I wouldn’t stand on them if I were you) will trick the enemy to think they are walkable, causing him to plumet to his death. Walls cannot be turned into other tiles (because it caused bugs with the pathfinding =P).

The third illusion is an upgraded decoy, these cause any bullet they are hit by to be reflected back towards their attacker (with a slight random offset). This is most expensive as it’s pretty much a guaranteed win.

If you select an illusion but decide you don’t want to cast it, simply right click to cancel and keep running.

Next on my todo list:

1. Loading enemy positions from file.
2. Level select screen.
3. Actual sprites…
4. General polishy goodness.

Enjoy!

…It’s been emotional. Well, not so much emotional as tiring and mildly stressful. Hell of a lot of fun though.

For my first forray into the Ludum Dare I managed to make a fully functioning prototype with only two known bugs, neither of which even come close to breaking the game. =D
It was actually a fairly substantial game given the time, I’m pretty proud of it.

Brace yourself for the upload of my Timelapse at some point tomorrow (it’s actually uploading as I speak) and a post-mortem at some point during the week. Probably saying that next time I’ll use an actual engine and a different language.

But for now, I think it’s time for sleep. Good night.

I just uploaded a Time lapse of the making of my entry, Illusion.

Enjoy. =]

I’m here for a second stab at this here LudumDare thing.

Like last time art will be made by doodling with a graphics tablet in photoshop, sound will be made by pressing buttons and adjusting sliders in SFXR and music will probably not exist.
Unlike last time I’m not being so careful with regards to language choice… I’m going for a bit of JavaScript via some HTML5. I’ve never even touched the canvas API before, but have been meaning to and I do at least intend to before the start of the competition. We’ll see how this pans out.

Woo, and indeed, hoo, to you all.