I’ve been following Ludum dare for a year now. I found out about Ludum dare by watching Notch’s live stream of  him making prelude of the chambered. I watched it from beginning to end and was so intrigued with it that I decided to start learning Java. I learnt in small doses over a period of  9 months until june when I really picked it up. 2 or 3 weeks ago I started programming a game : ).

I talked to a guy last night who said it takes years of experience to make a game and doing it alone is worse. Thinking that was true I went to lay down. Laying there I questioned If I am ready to make a game… and I came to the conclusion…

Hell Yes!!! I have a year of on and off Experience. I have been making so much progress in the last two months and my game is doing fine. If I get stuck I work my ass off to find the problem, and when I find it I learn how to fix it and make it better. I’m not saying that I don’t have SO MUCH MUCH MORE to learn. What I am saying is that YOU DO NOT need a lot of experience to make a game.

To those participating in the compo and the jam, do your best and give it your all, I cant wait to play your games. Have a Good day and will see you all At the compo.

I am making a small game in 12 – 18 hours to practice for  the Compo at 1 AM  PST which is in less than 50 minutes. I’ll see you there! 😀 http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor (viewers decide the theme)

I’m streaming again. Going to practice for the compo, taking notes studying and preparing for Ludum dare 24.

The language I will be using is Java. I will only be using Java for everything… Which means no external resources.

No promising the stream will be of good quality but if it starts putting stress on my computer I will turn the bit rate and resolution down a bit.  I might have a friend to talk to if not there will be music. I hope it goes well :). http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012 at 3:36 am and is filed under LD #24. 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.

I was just streaming for 5 ish hours but had to stop because of terrible lag. I restarted the stream every now and then but eventually that didnt work. I have a decent machine but it still isnt enought to stream to twitch. Does anyone have any suggestions for Less cpu/ memory nabbing streaming solutions?

thank you, Skylar

I had a problem yesterday but I  have fixed said problem.  I will be streaming for the next 18- 20 hours. If you know how to add audio to java games and want to coach me through it please tell me in the Twitch chat. Audio is the only thing I Have neglected to learn and i would appreciate the help :). See you there. http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor

I have been doing my best to figure out and learn and memorize the stuff I will need to make a game in Java. While doing that I’ve neglected learning how to export… I know how to Export … its just I don’t know how to export WITH pictures. I’ve looked high and low for A tutorial that makes sense to me, but I’ve had no luck . Can someone please help me?..

Oh boy. Could you imagine if I didn’t try and learn this until the END of the compo?

After a bit of complications last night I have found an alternate way to deal with my problems. I was Having the hardest time in trying to export resources with the src inside the jar… after looking around the internet for a good 12 hours I found no solution that made sense to me(I am dyslexic and most things I read aren’t processed in my head properly, I learn from videos…. and there where still no videos i could follow without my head exploding).

I was about to give up completely when I realized… My biggest project “Cael Venatus”(There is nothing of the game outside of my group of friends and wont be for another few months)has no outsourced Graphics… It might be simple but there is Allot of detail for graphics made inside of an engine. So that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m using Java… That’s it.

Go watch me At http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor 😀 Gonna be fun

—Please ignore spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

Its been almost a month since the LD24. I did  not finish my project because i broke under the pressure of time and quit half way through because what I was trying to do was a bit much and to advanced for me. Discouraged and sad I stopped programming for a few weeks.

School started and I made a promise to myself that I would straighten my life. Starting with school, I decided to do correspondence courses(Basically home school) for the classes I failed last semester because I only had one important class at school(English). So now I’m half -way through Science 10 in less than a week, next I just have to upgrade my math from apprentice ship to Regular math 10 and next semester I will be able to take Pre-cal and physics.

Once School got fixed, I decided to fix my social life. I wont really go into details, but I have been talking to an awesome girl the last few weeks and I hope that goes well.

And at the bottom of my priorities there was programming which is what I’m looking into right now. I want to Program it is one of my favourite things to do. So I started programming again. I also came back on the site the first time since the compo and seen mini LD37… that looks confusing as hell, so, I figure that I’m better off going for the October challenge instead. I have an awesome game Idea and have been looking for an excuse of sorts to do it.

I’ll make another post in a week when the compo starts. For now I’m going to do some preparation  (Story & sound).

buh bye. cant wait

Well, have a terrific idea for a game. Wish I had thought of it earlier or at least played the game that inspired me earlier. The story and game mechanics for my game is much inspired by both the Walking dead game and Heavy Rain. I don’t exactly know what the plot is but if im going to try and make a game like that I should at least make the bulk of the engine over the weekend. I’m not sure if it would be possible to build a game like this in a month but i best not waist time and get started. I’ll post screenshots, etc, of my progress on Sunday.  That’s all for now. Bye.

So I said that I’d have something to show for my game today but it seems that I was at my friends all weekend playing Borderlands 2. We also had “beat Mom” races in The Binding of Isaac, and while we where playing we asked the question what if this game where multi-player. With that, the previous Idea I had for the game (Walking dead/Heavy Rain Inspired) completely turned into Multi-player Binding of Isaac. I know I wont be able to complete an online version, but on the same screen might be possible. So tomorrow I promise I’ll  have something to show.

Till then.

Well after days of scrambling my brain over what kind of game this will be, I finally figured it out! This:

Never Distant End is going to be a –randomly generated text adventure game–. When creating your character you can chose between classes, gender, race(elves, dwarves, etc) and belief. After that, you go to the next screen and “roll” your stats, depending on your class, gender, etc. you get a bonus in certain attributes. Once your character is made your story scrolls across the screen, there will be certain things said in the dialogue that will add to your inventory, if it says: “He was a Wealthy man, and a hobby Sword Smith.” you can easily understand that you’ll have money in your pocket and you’ll start with a basic sword.

After you create your character you go to towns and villages and dungeons and fortresses in search for adventure. If you die its game over.

All of that is only a rough idea of Never Distant End. I hope to show gameplay sometime this week. but until then, have a good day.

So As I said in the last post “I promise to show something within the week” and well… I’m keeping my word and can say on Saturday afternoon or evening there will be be a video and screen shots, etc. of Never Distant End.

I can say for now that the game idea isn’t fully realized but it is fairly complex and in the last 2 days I have revised the idea probably 4 – 5 times.

The game is a “fancy “text adventure. Why “fancy”? mostly because it is super detailed and the world is not linear and is never the same… EVER. You start by creating your character in so many ways, then you start your adventure. When you start your adventure you are given 2-3 random perks; rich, poor, a random profession, etc. and are In a new place every time you you start. All of everything is pretty much random, all of the text that pops up on screen is randomly chosen and then randomly ad libbed. There are main quests and that’s how you beet the game, of course you might ask what happens after you beat the game? will your character get deleted? would it even be worth it? My answer… When you beat the main quest you start a new game with the character you just beat the game with, just starts on a higher difficulty and ties in a bit with the previous story. At the moment I’m working on Enemies, Items and just finished basic status Ailments(Poison, Paralyze, Sleep) .

That’s all I wanted to say at this point. I’m having fun and hope I stay true to my promise of having something to see by Saturday. till then

I got sick since the last post thus I couldn’t work for 2 days. “Dude you could have been working the 2 days you where sick!”… No I couldn’t have, I was so sore on Friday and couldn’t move anything without feeling a numbness or slight pain and yesterday I just didn’t feel like working at all. So I have today and tomorrow(Canadien Thanks Giving) to do as much work as I can. I’ll see what I can do to show you something by tonight.

Since I can’t really figure out some Story generating problems I guess I’ll work on combat. Ya…. combat in a text adventure game… Awesome…

Have a good one. :3

So I took a few days off. I had to take care of some school things as well as get the tickets for me and my friends to got to PAX east for spring break. We are all really exited and cant wait! Finally, having everything out of the way I looked over my project and asked myself; “Is this really the game I want to push for October Challenge?”, I looked at all of the projects that I have put on hold for other projects, I finally got to my first Project , Space Game. I seen a lot of potential in Space Game, I reviewed the code, and realized that since I started programming at the begging of the summer and by August made the a large leap from just making simple calculators to.. making a game. I shouldn’t have to explain what its about or what you do in it because the title should say it all! Space Game is to be honest one of my life achievements, don’t get me wrong, Space Game when I first made it was the most simple thing ever, but it pushed me ahead and made me want to keep keeping on with learning Java and game programming all together.

As much as I would hate to do it… I’m putting Never Distant End away. I’m just going to use October as a continuation for Space Game. I aim to have it finished by December. I’m going to set a few goals for October Challenge though.

• Fix the state finding and loading system(I was originally using booleans… not good Idea)
• Finish the GUI
• Fix ALL of the level generation (ambient stars, planets and Mobs)
• add a few creatures
• Get started with on land generation(on planets and such)

This is my progress up until I stopped working on this a month ago(I named it Build 2.2):

So that’s currently all I have to show you for now. Till next time.

So October Challenge was a bust for me! I went through 3 games none of them even remotely worked out, but I learned a lot while doing it. So after quite a bit of thinking, planning, Ideas going up and crashing soon after I gave up. So I did what I usually do after a failure… I play The binding of Isaac. and after beating the game multiple times and just so obsessed with everything about it I snapped out of it and realized that games like FTL, tBoI and Minecraft that its this random infinite game play that I just love. and The Binding of Issac is my favourite and I had a terrific Idea to bring the fantasy world that me and my friend created would be the base and it would play very much like it but with big differences also. I don’t know if it will pull through but I hope to bring it as far as I can. That’s all for now.

So, its been 4 months since the last LudumDare and 4 days until the next. I have gotten a lot more practice yet I know theres still a ton left to learn. So I’m not 100% sure if i’ll be able to finish this one either, but I’ll do my best to make it happen.

Though I’ve learnt a lot… I dont know how to compile with rescources. I know how to compile and add/use images in the compiler, but when I compile them through Eclipse with Images they dont show in the program. If you can help please comment.

So yea. I’ll be using;
IDE: Eclipse
Language: Java
Graphics: Paint.net
Sound: Musagai?(I havent even worked with.
any audio yet, but theres still time to learn :)(I dont need help with that… ive watched countless tutorials on it and dont think itll be to much of a problem)).

I cant wait for Friday. Ill be live streaming it most likely@ Twitch.com/skyllartor, I’ll probably stream every night till then too.

See ya!

Hi. As the title says. I want some quick theme suggestions for an over night practice!

I’ll start streaming 8:30-9(in about an hour) @ www.twitch.tv/skyllartor

Ok, so theres only a day and ten hours till the jam. The theme is my determining factor. If I’m not able to find a concept for the theme within two hours of the theme announcement, then im not sure if I’ll join in. But if thats the case I’ll still make something.

And im not so sure of streaming or not. Depends if im in the mood for it. I’ll record it though.

Happy Ludum Dare!

Ok, so a bit over 23 hours to the jam. I have been practacing a fair bit but not as much as last time. I think the reason I felt so overwelmed and quit last time is because I was burnt out on coding after practicing for an entire two weeks non stop. I learnt a bit of java and seen the Ludum Dare and was dead set on learning as quick as I can so I could participate.

But of course this time I am ready. I’ve made 3 posts already since this big posting rush started.

And of course I kinda want to talk about my failed October challenge. Now, I personaly knew I wasnt going to finish. After a social problem tore a hole in my heart I had a massive moral drop where I completly stoped programming for A week and a half. So with that this up-coming winter holiday I will make a game from the 21st of December to the 4th of january… I want to have a… Holiday Challenge? I’ll post about it after the jam.

Anyways. Last of all; for some strange reason I cant login to my acount on my computer so I’m currently wrighting this on a WiiU. Anyone else having this problem?

Have a happy Ludum Dare!

So I’ve asked multiple times, yet nobody’s ever given me an answer! When ever I go to compile my game in eclipse which has .png files in a res folder the sprites never load. They work perfectly fine in the editor but stand alone they don’t. It’s annoying and one of the only things standing in my way. Help would be extremely appreciated!

40 minutes till the compo starts! I’ve been busy getting last minute preparations. I am so pumped. I’m going to eat dinner then return to start My live stream up! Once again everybody have a Happy Ludum Dare!

http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor#