Hey Community!

This is my first Ludum Dare. I am really looking forward to this event. I will use my 2d-Framework which is available through sourceforge. It is a very small framework which I used in all my games (published and unpublished). My game will be running on Windows.

I’ve got a webcame beside me and try to be active at twitter and my weblog. Timelapse will create a cool video in the end.

I wanna play & create two days long with you all.

Lets make games

A very coarse design is ready. GUI is prototyped as you can see in the pic.

My Idea:

2 Bases sending out units. Every base can build towers to switch their enemies into friends and therefor use them as weapons. They can also be made stronger. But since the mind-controlling towers have a failure rate, it is risky to make units stronger!

Hope that will add to some tension and will result in a funny game.

AI will be the tricky part, I think.

Lets rock as long the coffee is hot!

Just want to show you my draft for the gui. To get a feeling for sizes and the overall game.

Tags: gui

Hi folks,

game is still not playable… *panic*

But here is some energy particle madness for you:

And of course some food:

pizza (vegetarian) :and breakfast:

Just want to show the latest screenie:

Fresh Tomatoes out of the garden, fresh herbs and some slices of mozarella pizza:

The last hours are coming close, time to get some NUTS:

Trust your Enemy

…train them and then use them!

Lets get into some details…

First: another Screenshot:

download:
http://games.spunkmeyer.de/downloads/Trust_Your_Enemy.zip
source:
http://games.spunkmeyer.de/downloads/Trust_Your_Enemy_Sources.zip

I started saturday morning with no idea in my mind. After my breakfast I had my idea of a game with team-switching units.

You should be able to upgrade units to make them stronger and faster. But what if your units change the team? You need to keep a balance between strong units and defending your homebase.

That was my idea.

I am working with my own little 2D framework. And I wanted to write code in a way that I could use it afterwards. Mainly GUI-Code. That was not a good idea since it took nine hours 

In the end I have some GUI code which I can extract, polish and complete later. Thats the good side. The bad side is that it took really long to get even buttons to work and therefore I started with some core game mechanics on the second day. Far too late.

Next time: Just write down idea, write some cards to work on, and dont think about tomorrow

The cards are really helping. First you get an overview of what needs to be done. Second you get motivated if you can go to the next card.

I had a friend with me, who was coding for LD, too. Thats inspiring at one side and a bit distracting at the other side.  Another friend joined on saturday and coded some hours with us. I would do that again, but be more strict with schedule.

Dev-Log:

Also watch the Timelapse-Video!

saturday
4:00 Dreaming about theme… zzz…
6:22 Shower
6:44 Thinking… watching blog…
6:56 go for a walk, buy food
7:25 Brainstorm
7:33 Think I got an idea…
7:55 more detailed designwork
8:26 Breakfast
9:09 refining design
9:17 starting implementing/drawing
10:41 implementing core mechanics
11:00 need a more detailed plan…
11:34 starting card 1/16 (Core)
12:06 starting card 2/16 (bases)
12:20 buying stuff to eat….
13:44 continuing
14:52 Writing a generic GUI class
16:35 need to get GUI done…
16:47 GUI Mockup
18:00 gui class continue…
18:51 food ordering
19:08 gui…
19:49 foodum dare
20:04 gui…
23:15 Card 3/16 enemies…
sunday
0:28 sleeptime
7:07 cant sleep… must code…
8:09 Card no 4 (Energy sources)
8:36 buying breakfast
8:50 coding
9:30 breakfast!
9:54 coding again
10:34 card 5/16 yay, progress
11:25 card nr 6/16 bases
17:22 Card 7/16 Towers!
17:33 need a POWERNAP!! 😉
18:03 I need a showr!
18:26 continue
19:14 tower graphics
21:40 tower logic
22:13 Card 8/16: AI!
monday
2:22 finishing the unfinished (random cards)
4:00 submitted game, go..to..bed….

I made recordings with several programs during the competition. Here are the useless details:

Stats:
80000 keystrokes (I think the tool missed some…)
2.7 km mouse movement
11,500,000  pixels mouse movement
23000 leftclick
51000 wheel
350 rightclicks

programs used:
codeblocks  17.6 h
irc/icq  3.5 h
firefox  2.9 h
photopaint  2.1 h
test/debug  1.2 h
windows  1.1 h (moving files, searching files, open,…)
gimp  0.9 h

And a heatmap where I clicked (mostly in code window, taskbar, tabs, menus)

Thats my summary of the LD #18 competition.

I really enjoyed it and will participate in the future.

If you are interested in the polished game, follow my blog dev.spunkmeyer.de or visit games.spunkmeyer.de in the future

Will go to sleep early today to start early in the morning.

Lets make some games!

Finally I got my idea. Discover objects in space, but only use your gravitation sensors. You basically fly around in space and try to avoid crashing into objects and you have to guess where objects are, and how many mass they have.

I am working on a little proof of concept first, to see if the gameplay would be fun or too hard…

Prototype is making progress. Went out to walk in the snow

After getting the math done, I can finally show you what my gravity sensor in the bottom of the screen looks like.

Alpha state is coming closer

Tags: screenshot

What I need to do:

• Highscore
• Titlescreen and Introduction
• Sounds
• Music
• Particles
• Background
• Testing

The actual Screenshot:

Tags: foodphoto

So, I submitted the game. Before the deadline. Thats a win, right? 😉

Gameplay Video

Game can be found here:  Compo-Entry

I tried to make it really simple. But there were a few things to consider for next time:

• If you are Ill, like I was, your energy levels are too low to get into a flow-like state
• I need to check for a good method to make music in a fast way. I like tonematrix, but couldn’t record that music…
• I want to have a good option-screen where users can choose the resolution for example. My game is flexible, but the window isnt…
• My webcam and Chronolapse are causing my notebook cpu to run at 30% constantly (1 image per minute). Need to find out why…

Timelapse Video of my Screen (Webcam made problems…):

timelapse

Comments I made during this LD session:

8:48   Breakfast
9:20   Thinking about theme
9:43   got my idea
9:45   Proof of Concept
11:22   Math time
13:15  break is over, time for creating a player
14:20  another break. searching for nice music to hear while coding.
14:40   Coding first gui elements
14:50   Break: Walkin’ in snow
15:35   finishing proof of concept
20:57   Starting the alpha
0:01   daychange, alpha coming closer
0:24   trying to get pixel precise drawing
1:15   Adding game over and levelchange
3:35   strange fps error…
3:42   seems to work now. but cant make timelapse…
4:27   Alpha done! go to sleep…
7:50   3hrs sleep break over
7:58   time to get to beta with graphics and sound
9:51   Small break
10:30   breakfast
11:00   go go go
12:28   Almost good looking :0)
12:55   adding sounds
13:25   small break
13:55   Design polish
14:14   on the road
15:30   coffee break
19:30   the last meters
23:00  maybe adding levelchooser
0:55   2 hours left. polish
1:39   uploading first version

Like the last time, I want to give you statistics of my yourney:

• 20000 left clicks
• 400 right clicks
• 35000 mouse wheelies
• 3 kilometers mouse movement (on screen)
• 50000 keyboard key presses
• 2000 Lines of code
• 32 hours on screen time (8 hours sleep, 8 hours breaks)
• 14 hours coding
• 4 hours browsing in the internet (2 hours on ludumdare.com)
• 2.5 hours chatting
• 1.5 hours drawing
• 1.4 hours debugging

Here is a heatmap of my monitor, showing where I clicked the most:

I saw many good games coming up at the website and want to play some of them!

But at first, I will go to bed now

See you next time!

I hope i have at least 24 Hours this time to participate. Will use my own framework again

LD21FP_BS_gogo

Without any further words…

Tags: deskphoto

Thats the name of my idea.

It will be a dungeon-shooter with endless ammo, endless bugs and endless “decals”

The dungeons will have a “social” feature (incl. webdata) and will be procedurally generated.

The graphics will be programmer art

Lets make a milestone-list….

Thats what I’ve done so far:

• Brainstorming for an idea.
• Fleshed out the idea, all an some pages of paper
• Made 2 little proof of concepts for the core mechanics (network stuff)
• Made a milestone plan with 16 Milestones and a time schedule of 25 hours (need time to sleep and a time-buffer)

Beginning to work on the game now. Production-Phase 😉

Snacktime! Pancake with peanut butter!

Tags: foodphoto