Alright, I’m going to give this theme a try with Flixel. I have come up with a hastily scrawled notebook page of ideas:

Alright, after a very long night of coding, I think I’ve got my game to where I want it, with a few hours still on the clock.

It is playable here: http://switchbreak.net/blog/?page_id=147

It's Dangerous To Go Alone! Take This.

We have our theme and off and running.

And… I’ve got nothing. Time to brainstorm for a few hours. Maybe some menial labor to keep my brain active. Time to clean house.

Here is what I do know. I’ll be working with FlashPunk as my chosen framework, and the game won’t be a Zelda clone.

16 hours in, 32 to go – I don’t know if I’ve made it to 1/3rd completion yet, but I do have my first test prototype mocked up. No graphics yet, and none of the collecting survivors mechanic, just a test of the swing/release controls. Play it here:

Click the image to play the control test prototype

And here is another page from my notebook expanding on the design I’m going for with the controls.

Controls concept sketch

And now it is time to start working on some graphics.

8 hours to go and I feel like the game is finally shaping up into something.

I’ve started to draw some sprites and add effects to the game. Not sure about my falling-cubes waterfall effect, but maybe it does the job. Let me know in the comments if it evokes “waterfall” or is completely baffling.

Things that remain to do:

1. Sound effects
2. Player and survivor sprites
3. MORE LEVELS

5 hours to go and I’m up to prototype 4 of Waterfall Rescue:

UPDATE: Forgot to include the link, now it should work.

Click the image to play this prototype

I’ve added sound effects, and done some work on the swing. I widened the arc for it, and added easing into the tops of the swing, which will hopefully make it easier and more natural-feeling. This played a little bit of havoc with my already spotty physics on the survivors hanging off of you, but in a 48-hour game you need to focus on gameplay first and damn the consequences. Hopefully the benefit this has to the feel of the swinging will outweigh the physics weirdness introduced.

What do you think? Any and all feedback between now and 9 PM tonight would be highly appreciated!

Todo list:

1. Sound effects
2. Character art
3. MORE LEVELS

Final countdown! The clock is at 2 hours remaining! This is the last prototype I will post before the submission build:

Click the image to play

I did manage to work out a lot of the wonkyness in the physics with this build, while keeping my improved swing controls (and improving the feel of them just a little bit more.) I built a number of levels as well, and added some tricks to the later ones.

I have two more hours to take in feedback and fix problems, so let me know what you think!

Okay, the final game is complete, submitted, source code zipped and frozen, everything is done. Finished right on the buzzer.

The main difference between what I submitted and the final prototype I posted a few hours ago is this has a mute button (M on your keyboard or click the icon in the upper right), and a more full tutorial on stage 1.

You can play it here and see for yourself: Waterfall Rescue.

Now I’m gonna go get some sleep.

I just had to make a version of this game with character sprites and music, so while the competition version is still sitting there on my site for the voters to play, here is a newer version for the jam that I put up on Kongregate:

Waterfall Rescue

Alright, in this thing for real. I sure hope the theme isn’t 1000 kittens.

I’ll be using FlashDevelop and FlashPunk to make a game, probably bfxr and audacity and GNU image manipulation program and all that as well. Here we go!

Alright, after wasting a lot of time on an idea I didn’t like, I’ve got one I’m running with now. You play as a Sun God, attempting to bring life to your solar system by throwing bacteria filled asteroids at it.

White boarding the game idea

So the idea is this, basically:

You play as the Sun God with your own lifeless solar system. You have a number of respawning asteroids orbiting close, and you can pull back and release on those with the mouse to fire them out into the orbits of your various planets. Every planet has a health and evolution bar – if there is life on the planet, the health bar is constantly recharging. The evolution bar goes up when it’s hit by an asteroid, and the health bar goes down. If the health bar gets too low, biodiversity goes into a spiral and the evolution bar starts to drain. If it hits zero, then all life is wiped out and evolutionary progress is reset.

There are various complications that can be brought into this design, depending on the time I have to build it out fully. Skipping an asteroid off of one planet into another for life bonuses! Planetary defense systems near the top of the evolution bar shooting down incoming asteroids! Extrasolar alien invaders! Intrasolar wars! Combo multipliers! Getting an asteroid into a stable orbit as a planet’s moon for huge points!

We’ll see what it turns into.

Okay, a few false starts and a quick refresher on Verlet integration and I’ve got planetary orbit physics working and a basic framework ready for me to start working on the actual game part tomorrow. Now, for sleep.

Planets orbiting, doesn’t look like much yet but it’s moving how it should

Getting the controls and the basic physics sorted out on Sun God, I hope to have this fully playable by tonight and then spend all day Sunday working on the graphics. We’ll see where it’s at!

Now for a nice big steak lunch.

So the game doesn’t have any enemies in it yet, so there is not much barrier to going straight to 100% completion yet, but here is a test of my (very weird) controls and evolution mechanic:

You can play it here

Click Image To Play

It’s a bit hard to figure out how it controls or what the goal is, so I’ll try to break it down:

1. Pull back and release on the yellow asteroids to launch one, then hold the mouse button down to control it in flight
2. Scroll wheel zooms in and out
3. Planets have two bars: the red one (left) is health, the green one (right) is evolution. Health will refill on its own, evolution will not fill itself from empty, and will fill more quickly the more full it is.
4. After seeding some planets with life, you can come back and harvest the life off of them by crashing an asteroid into the planet. This will take health and evolution away from that planet, but will give you an asteroid loaded with bacteria to fly to another planet and get its evolution bar started.
5. Flying close to a planet without hitting it will rain bacteria down on its surface, increasing the evolution bar. You can only rain on planets that are at full health.
6. The goal is to get all planets to 100% evolution.

Alright, it’s 3 AM and way past my usual sleeping time. Time to sleep, then scramble to get enemies and sound into the game tomorrow. I would love to hear what anyone thinks of the prototype and suggestions for improvements.

Peace!

Sun God

This game is in and playable! Click the picture to get to it.

There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t manage to finish in time, but that is what the Jam is for I guess. Good night everyone!

Did the trendy thing and made a time-lapse video of the development of Sun God. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3CUGS4V7Ng

Tags: timelapse

Sun God: Jam Version

So, just in time to submit it for the Jam, I’ve made an updated version of Sun God – now with enemies!

So the 48-hour compo gets the pacifist, relaxing Sun God game and the Jam gets the challenging, violent version. You decide which is better!

Going to give this a try again. I’ll be using Cocos2D-Javascript to make a JS/HTML5 browser game, unless I find a framework that’s better. This will be my first try at making a Javascript game.

Okay! I’m in once again, I’m using phaser.io and making an HTML5 game. I’ve even got an idea for the theme: Cyberpunk Football.

The idea is that you are invading a system in cyberspace with a group of programs carrying information that you need to smuggle past the defense systems. However this information contains a scanned consciousness, and it cannot ever be copied, only moved from one agent to another. That way, you only get one payload. Your agents behave like football players, making plays and blocking for the advance of the agent carrying the payload information.

I’m honestly a bit too tired to tell if this is a terrible idea or not, we’ll see tomorrow when it starts to come together.

Until then, this wouldn’t very well be a Ludum Dare blog post without a picture of food, so here is some awesome ramen I’m eating for dinner:

Still messing with controls to get an entertaining football-type game going, you can play my first test at it by clicking that image.