This is me saying that I’m doing the Ludum Dare. It’s for the first time and I just found this last night, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m a bored high school student and my BIIF championship for track is this weekend, so we’ll see how fast I can code in a day and a half.

Language: It’s all going to be done in C++

Libraries: I’ll be using the Irrlicht game engine for my graphics, IrrKlang for sound, and possibly Newton for physics.

Graphics: All my graphics will be done in gimp and/or blender.

Platform: A terrible, half-broken windows laptop with an Ubuntu VM. But it still owns any Mac computer.

Additional Base Code: I am using Irrlicht and Newton, but I made/am working on this cool framework that uses them together in an easy-to-use way. The rules of the competition say I can use it as long as I declare it before the competition, so here is me saying that I’m using it! The files, including the source (do with it what you will), is below. P.S. it’s compiled with GCC in code blocks.

My aftershock game famework: http://www.sendspace.com/file/xaiz07

My game is about a robot who must embark on an epic journey to defeat the evil Lord Souza (Mr. Souza was my freshman physics teacher and he asked me to make him the main villain in my next game the other day.) The journey will be far too dangerous to go alone, so his cowardly friend gives him a pickle to help fight off the minions.

Well, my game was a complete failure, but I did learn from my mistakes. For one, I should make sure I have at least a little game plan. Second using physics was a huge no-no. It made things far too complicated and screwed up my player controller. Thirdly, I need to make sure I have the time to finish my game – I only got to work for about 18 hours total. I also spent wayyyyy too long in the beginning trying to figure out really dumb things that I had to end up simplifying to move on anyway.

I’ll be looking forward to the next dare! Good luck to everyone.

The game is coming along quite nicely. So far, I have implemented collision detection, an inventory/equipment system, basic AI, and a very basic level editor.

The idea is basically a strategic escape game where you use your two rovers to solve puzzles and perform battle tactics.

Twenty-one and a half hours into development and this is where the game is at. I’m very pleased with the way it’s turning out. It has RTS controls for your rovers, dragNdrop inventory slots, doors, some basic graphical effects, and a maturing item system.

After 28 and a half hours of straight game development, this beautiful creation is complete. I’m quite proud of it 😀 stayed up all night and until 4:30 AM the other night. Good luck to everyone!

So, all in all, I think this dare went WAY better than my last (which was my first). I think what mainly accounted for my better outcome was finally swallowing my pride and deciding to write a 2D game. It’s amazing how much removing that 3rd dimension simplifies things. I wanted to make something cool, so I really didn’t want to spend too much time just trying to think of ideas. I couldn’t think of any amazing revolutionary new game play style, so I just went with the good old classic top-down shooter. Of course, to keep it with the theme, I set the goal of the game to escape the game. I probably won’t do too well on theme points but I’m still proud of my creation. After all, who of us really does this in hopes of winning? I just do it as a motivational leap to start a new project.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4069

What Went Right

So, for the most part, the beginning went very smoothly. I stayed up until 4:30 AM the first day and got a lot of the core coding done. I started with the basics – a basic OOP design in C++ (my language of choice), movement, and collisions. Then, I started to get my hands dirty with a weapon system. Unfortunately, I ended up changing the weapon system since adding new weapons eventually turned out to be a huge hassle (this was actually after I finished the compo version game). Next came the rovers. Rovers went along a lot smoother than I expected them to. No problems really there. All hell broke loose when I started programming doors though.

What Went Wrong

Basically, I thought doors were going to be like 30 minutes tops, but they ended up being like 2 hours. First, I had to write basic animation functionality in the object class – no problem. Switching states became a huge hassle and I finally  broke down and analyzed the update loop step by step – then I finally got it. I was forcing a specific frame in the door code on certain states, but this created problems, so I ended up just letting them flow naturally and not try to prevent the occurrence of a bad frame (which I later found was not possible to occur). Another huge issue that I didn’t expect was scrolling. Yes, scrolling. Of all things that could go wrong, scrolling did. I ended up having to edit a lot of drawing code that should have been there from the beginning.

All in all, I think my favorite thing to add was the shaking when an explosion goes off. It’s freakin’ awesome 😛

Thanks for a great Ludum Dare guys! I had a great time.

We’re doing the game jam because I’m not an artist and my friend isn’t a programmer.

The story: Your creator (you’re a robot), a mad partying scientist, got a sugar crash on 4/20 day. Every year, as a result of his sugary crash, something goes wrong. Last year, he shrunk the sun and had to build a giant grow ray to reverse the effects. The experienced elders of the town became wise of this and attached rocket thrusters to every day objects such as refrigerators and dumpsters to escape whatever the scientist would screw up. Unfortunately, they didn’t escape and shrunk along with their rocket propelled life rafts. Your mission is to get to the moon (by growing and jumping on the shrunken rocket propelled life rafts) and activate the giant grow ray there to destroy the expanding shrink force to save the universe.

Core gameplay is done: you can move and jump around and grow things.

A few screenshots of our game so far:

Before grow ray:

After grow ray:

So the competition is about halfway over (technically we’re in the jam, but we have to fight grizzly bears at school on Monday). The core gameplay is coming out nicely, you can grow the shrunken objects temporary to make your way across the level. Also a little bloom 😀

But we do have pretty graphics!

And when you die:

Had to fix the particles and Lua scripting in my game engine. Also, we thought of a name for our game – Shrink Force. A few more screenshots, this time with lua-coded moving platforms. This was to make them more customizable without recompiling every time.

So this is the game engine I’ve been working on since January. I think it’s come a very long way. It’s written completely in C++. The screenshot is of the editor. It’s built off of the API. I never came up with a cool name, so it’s just called GameEngine. It’s a lot like Unity. It uses Irrlicht for rendering, Bullet for physics, and Lua for scripting. I’ll be using this in the MiniLD. The editor also has support for C++ projects. It builds your games for Windows and Android so far. Working on Linux and Mac. I work on it when I can now, though I just graduated from high school, so the grad parties are pretty amazing/time consuming :D. Also, I live in Hawaii, home of the world’s slowest internet.

This will be my fourth Ludum Dare and I am excited! In the past I’ve used Irrlicht with C++, but now I’m going to migrate to SFML since the API is MUCH cleaner in terms of 2D (which I would expect since Irrlicht is an outstanding *3D* engine 😉 ). My last game, Shrink Force, which I did with a team, was 3D, and it ended up being too much to be able to polish, so I’m going with 2D this time.

I have a serious addiction to writing my own game engines, so I will probably write a simple framework for SFML right before the competition.

Tool Box:
– CodeBlocks with MingGW g++
– SFML
– My framework that I haven’t written yet
– Root beer

Hey, so I already wrote the obligatory “In” post, but now I’m REALLY ready. As promised, I wrote a simple framework this week and it’s ready for the Ludum Dare (I hope)! I uploaded it to GitHub, and you can find it here. I called it Fission.

Here’s a screenshot of it’s capabilities!

Good luck and have fun! Just 20 more minutes!

So the idea is that you control a pretty much all-powerful villain trying to crush the world, and you use your many powers to crush hordes of good guys hopelessly dying to save their planet. Eventually, you will die and receive a score.

Baddy Character:

Off to a pretty good start. There’s basic animations and AI in. Also, the code for the weapons is done.

Screen shot!

Good night all!

So just passing half time, here’s the status update. The AI is just about done, things shoot at you now, and the level is almost completely done. Now for the super powers allowing to annihilate all the good guys!

Screenshot!

Spontaneous explosions!

This has been my 4th Ludum Dare and this time I decided to work with a friend, so we submitted to the jam. Also, the extra time was helpful since we had things to do throughout the weekend. I was the programmer and he was the artist. I used a framework around SFML that I wrote right before the competition.

Overall, I think the game came out pretty good. We did have to let a few features go, but that happens every time. Basically, you are an overpowered villain who attacks hordes of brave marines with your many powers. You can zap people like a Sith, move objects around using telekinesis, and spawn spontaneous explosions!

What went right: The framework. SFML is on par with root beer on my list of cool things. The SFML code was clean and easy to implement into an object oriented framework. The framework I wrote has some cool ground features like physics, lighting, and easy input handling. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/DrSuperSocks/Fission

What went wrong: Me and my friend had very different opinions on how the final game should look. Also, towards the end of the competition, I had little motivation to finish after not getting enough sleep. Also, I was stressed because my car wouldn’t start, but it was just a simple electrical issue and it was finished. Yay!

Play the game right here

Screen shots!