Hey all,

I’m Max and I’m a 17 year old from England who kinda lives near London. This is my first Ludum Dare, and to be honest I’ve only heard about this recently, some I’m not quite sure what to expect! But it should be fun, I hope! Better stock up on the tea and chocolate Hobnobs

I’m going to be using C++, SDL and OpenGL with my game library I’ve been developing, which is open source and on my Github account here:

https://github.com/supermaximo93/SuperMaximo_GameLibrary

I’m hoping to make a 2D retro game for a change (although it depends on the theme), so for assets I’ll be using some chiptune VSTs in FL Studio and some sort of Ubuntu equivalent to MS paint (or how about Gimp? =P).

See you around!

Tags: LD21

Yay! XD

My entry, Fred the Astro-Miner is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?uid=4920

You play as an astronaut who’s stuck in the middle of an asteroid, being chased by the giant alien that lives in the centre. You need to run away as fast as possible while trying to mine as much metal as you can!

I was quite busy this weekend, so I’m really happy with what I was able to get done in the time! The game is extremely short, as I intended for there to be more levels (there’s only one, and each level is split up into twelve small stages). There’s also a couple of bugs. I’ll probably keep working on the game though, especially if it gets some positive comments, introducing better graphics and more block types for more interesting, puzzle style gameplay.

Enjoy! =)

P.S. I’ll get a Windows executable up soon! At the moment it’s Linux only

Well, I finally got my entry, Fred the Astro-Miner, compiled for Windows! It was such a pain! I tried Visual Studio, but after spending hours modifying my (valid) C++ code so it was happy and finally compiled .o files, it refused to link. Hours later, it linked. And it didn’t work. I threw more hours of work into it and then I got a window to appear! Yay! But it always segfaulted at startup, no matter what I did -_-

Then I thought,”Why don’t I use Eclipse and G++, like I do in Linux?”. So many more hours later, after compiling GLEW from source and remembering to use Mingw libs instead of VS ones (!!!) I got it to work! Then much jumping around my room screaming with excitement ensued (I’m not joking. I was that happy). I didn’t need to modify my code at all by the way, except for replacing gl.h includes with glew.h. I’m pretty happy with that!

So you can check out my entry here, now in Windows!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4920

I’m in once again!

Last LD was quite hellish, due to large portions of my time spent coding tile and level loading systems rather than actually making the game. Coupled with me helping redecorate my bedroom in the same weekend… Yeah. After I finished my game I then proceeded to spend three days trying to get the damn thing to compile in Windows (I made the game in Linux), and then more time writing new shaders so the game would run on older hardware, but it still wouldn’t run on hardware that didn’t support OpenGL 3.0+ due to a flaw in my tile rendering system!

So, yeah. I’m not doing that again. It was my first LD and it was still fun, but at the same time quite horrible. I’ve decided that when it comes to making a game as fast as possible, using C++, SDL and OpenGL is not a good idea. Sure, I could probably do it quicker now this time, and cross-compiling is no longer a pain for me, but using those tools would still be unnecessary effort.

This time around, I’ll be using Flash with Flixel. I haven’t used it that much before; I used it for the first time yesterday, in fact, but it seems pretty damn simple and intuitive! I’ve got a day off school on Friday so I’ll be spending that day just getting a firm grasp with it. Best of all, it’ll be cross platform without any extra effort! Yay! I was originally intending to use Game Maker, but with Flash you just click a link in a web browser, and bam, it’s there!

I’ll be participating in the jam, as I’ll be working with a friend who’s going to do the artwork (hand drawn!) and music for the game. He (‘he’ being Ben) has a SoundCloud page here: http://soundcloud.com/dosage. He’s also doing the artwork and music for my main project, Station 6, a puzzle platformer (I have a devlog here: http://supermaximo.com/) </shameless plug>

And I think that’s all I have to say. Tool list:

Language: ActionScript 3

IDE: FlashDevelop

Graphics: Hand drawn by Ben

Audio: Dunno what software Ben uses, but it’s probably pretty good

Code libraries: Flixel

Development OS: Windows in a virtual machine, running on Ubuntu 11.04

Cake? Yes.

And now I leave you with Ben’s gentleman spider eye!

as is customary

As for the Poliwhirls, I found them in my loft and never put them back

Mike just wants to be alone!

Hey everyone! This is my third LD (first time went pretty badly, second time was a Jam and went pretty well!).

It’s been quite a while since the last time I made a game so I’m looking forward to this LD! Getting a job as a programmer isn’t conductive to game programming in your free time… There’s only so much you can take! But this weekend I’m making an exception.

Tools:

Language: AS3

IDE: FlashDevelop

Libraries: Flixel

Graphics: No idea

Audio: FL Studio

I’ll no doubt need to do some AS3 and Flixel revision on Friday… But as I write this, Chingu (a Ruby game dev library) has caught my attention… Interesting… Let’s hope if I end up using it I don’t get screwed by the Ruby garbage collector. We’ll see.

I also want to try and get more involved in the community this time… More posts to come!

So I’ve decided against using Ruby/Chingu. So that leaves AS3/Flixel…

But I’ve stumbled across Impact, a HTML5 Canvas game library. I’ve always been a bit skeptical about using HTML5 and Javascript for serious game development, but admittedly I hadn’t really looked into it for a long while. But looking at recent examples… I’m very impressed.

As a web developer I work with Javascript every day, so being able to make half-decent games with it would be great. It would also mean that I can implement, for example, online leaderboards and game saves, extremely easily. I know this is easily possible with other languages and frameworks out there, but being able to use Javascript and Ruby/Rails on the server side makes it trivial for me. (I’ve probably just stated the obvious for you HTML5 game dev buffs out there… but oh well)

So, back to Impact. It costs about £60 ($99 to be exact) for a licence, so I bought the Kindle version of ‘Introducing HTML5 Game Development’ (which is based on Impact) for £6 to see if it’s something I’d like. It’s only 103 pages and I’ve got most of the way through already, but from what I can gather from this book, Impact looks brilliant!

So right now, it’s a toss up between AS3/Flixel and JS/Impact. And I think Impact is winning…

So I took the plunge and bought Impact! Bye bye AS3 and Flixel. Here’s an updated tools list:

Languages: Javascript and HTML; Ruby for any server side stuff

Libraries: Impact, Ruby on Rails for any server side stuff

Editor: Sublime Text 2

Graphics: Still no idea, but probably some Paint.NET pixel thing

Audio: FL Studio, Bfxr

As is customary:

(The smaller screen is 21″ XD)

Or if I don’t want to be tied to my desk:

Or if I’m feeling like a lunatic:

I haven’t started. I’ve got a vague idea of what game I want to make… But I need to go out soon, which gives me time to think more about the idea… Should be able to get started this afternoon. But before I go, it’s time for lunch:

And all I have is this XD

Bear in mind that I’ve been asleep/busy-with-real-life, so… yeah. Full steam ahead!

My game is about some villainous dude breaking into a base of some sort, hacking computers and messing things up for some evil plan… All very vague because I haven’t actually decided on the specifics yet 😛

So far it’s still blocks of colour for art, but I’ve got some stuff functional: Player movement/shooting, guards and turrets with some basic AI, power supplies/computers that when destroyed/hacked trigger events, doors that can be opened by these events, explosion particle effects… Some gold (well, that’s what it’s called in the code) which you can collect, and then drop when you die (to be honest I have no idea why that’s even in there).

Tomorrow is going to be all about assets! Graphics, sound, levels (but part of me is thinking that instead of levels, it’s just one massive map and you have to complete all of the objectives), etc. Hopefully I can get it all done in time!

It’s 7am, I can’t see my screen without leaning towards it, I’m too tired to put on my contact lenses and my glasses are broken… Time for some emergency repairs. *Pulls out sellotape*

Yesterday night’s leftovers.

In other news, I did some spriting this morning.

Also, I got killed by a guard

Just under three hours. Everything is done, except for levels and music. Right. C’mon. I can do this.

It’s in! It’s nowhere near as done as I’d hoped it would be, but hey, LD isn’t about having a perfect game!

I wish I had more time to do levels… Also, my musical inspiration this evening (well, now it’s the morning) was lacking. Oh well.

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=4920

I might do a longer post tomorrow… But for now, SLEEP!