I finished my first ever LD game!

It’s just a simple sandbox game where you can teleport to other worlds and mine lots of gold in the sky.

If you think it looks interesting, you can check it out here.

There is a lot that went right, but even more that went wrong with my game, Peaceful Night.

The first thing that greatly affected my game was the genre, which is pretty obvious. I chose to make a 2D sandbox game, and although I did an OK job, it was simply too ambitious, especially considering that I had never done a few of the things I had to do (such as play audio loops).

The second thing was my extremely dumb decision to make it so that the game screen never is drawn larger than the default resolution. I was probably tired and not thinking straight, and then I didn’t really think about resizing afterwards. This resolution issue caused two problems:
1) It was not very fun and hard to play.

2) Resizing the window causes lots of lag.

Speaking of dumb decisions, although I am a novice graphics programmer and don’t really quite understanding how painting the screen works and stuff, I can say with some certainty that it’s a bad idea to force the screen to repaint every 10 ms. I’m also pretty sure that basically nullifies any reason to use a buffer for the graphics.

There were also a few other things I shouldn’t have done, such as prioritize higher-memory processes over lower-memory processes.

I also don’t really know the best way to do game loops in Java, so I hoped that using timers would be good enough.

Finally, because this idea was so ambitious, and I couldn’t implement any enemies, there is basically nothing to do other than try to figure out what the crafting recipes are.

Now, the one good thing is that I managed to make a walkcycle that doesn’t look terrible. I normally can’t do that.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my game. Although it didn’t turn out too well, I think it was OK for 48 hours, considering that I had never programmed some of the things in it before (such as an inventory GUI).

If you haven’t played and voted, I would love it if you did, even if you rate it 1 star!

I’m in! My tools:

Language: Java
IDE: Netbeans
Images: GIMP
Sound FX: sfxr

I also might try composing some music on my electric piano for music. I really need to get a MIDI editor!

I’m also using a little game library called spaghetti which I made today so that I don’t have to program a bunch of events or scramble in the last hour to figure out why my image loading code isn’t working (like I had to do during the previous two events…)

I hope to make a much better game than previously, but given my lack of real knowledge in game design, I doubt that I can accomplish that. 😉

In the first hour of the compo, I finalized most of the stuff in my awful awful “game library,” called Alfredo. Now that that’s over, I’ve finally started working on a game.

As always, it features my almost good enough bitmap art.

I’m hoping it doesn’t go the way of my entry for the 33rd Ludum Dare, which is eerily similar:

• Both were inspired by just a random flash of inspiration
• Both are related to technologyish stuff
• Both have a modular main character

Here is a screenshot of my trudging progress:

Here is a nice descriptor of everything I’ve done so far:

Now it just needs enemies and stuff!

If it’s rendering with antialiasing, here it is at the raw resolution:

Yay! 4 hours to do the following simple things:

• Make several menus
• Build 11 levels
  • This also includes any enemies that are needed in those levels
  • and tiles
  • and stuff
• All the sound FX (except for music)

In any case, the first level is looking good, in my opinion:

This is going to be my 6th Ludum Dare. Last time I didn’t participate in the voting so I was hoping to be able to do that this time. I guess not. 😛

I meant to work on my custom game library before the jam (it’s sort of a tradition) but I never got around to it. This is kind of a problem because right now raycasted collisions are broken so I probably won’t be making a platformer this time 😉

The good news is that this will boost my creativity a little, as my past two games (as well as my first one) were all platformers so this will be something different, and that will be refreshing.

That is, of course, if I can manage to wrangle my game library into submission. 😛

I’ve started out by making the main menu for my game this time. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the same name (or concept), but here is what the main menu looks like, as of now:

But not only do I have an image: I have music! See, for my last two games, menu music was kind of a last-minute thing, but this time, I’ve actually spent a little bit of time making the music:

(sorry for the obnoxious picture, I don’t know how to make it smaller…)

I’ve started working on the actual gameplay part of my game (I’ve heard that’s an important component) and I have some derpy train movement going!

(gif, ~1mb)

All the menus are done, all the sounds that I really need are done, now it’s just time to make 8 more levels that are at least somewhat entertaining.

Maybe I’ll actually complete a game this time! I’ve only really done that once before. 😛

It seems like whenever I go and try to submit my game, it suddenly won’t launch because the manifest file is completely screwed up, or all the images suddenly turned into orange triangles, or maybe it started only reading mouse input when space is pressed.

This time, there were lots of problems with trying to get it up on GitHub – first, git shell thought that git didn’t exist, which was a small problem, and then I managed to accidentally delete the .git directory, and on top of all that, I also had the manifest file problems.

But! I finally got it up!

My game is called TrainStack, and it is a “””puzzle””” game about building trains. The problem is, most of the levels are not particularly puzzling – the only one that truly is even close is the last level, and it was by complete accident.

I realized near the end of the compo that I could have made much more puzzling levels if I had just kept like the first 6 train-things I had made, and then just sort of randomly spread them throughout a level. But I didn’t end up doing that, because 1) I probably had too little time and 2) I liked all the silly little things I had made (like the anti-health train car, which blows up other cars when it blows up)

It’s certainly one of my most complete games, although it probably isn’t my most fun. But! I do kind of like the modular train builder, and there is a number of explosions.

I’m not sure anyone will like it, but I would appreciate feedback, so if it looks interesting to you, please comment! Thanks!

This will be my 7th Ludum Dare! 😀

As I always do, I will be using:

• GIMP for graphics (pixel art!)
• Java for code
• Netbeans for IDE
• SFXR (or maybe BFXR this time) for sound effects
• Beepbox for music

And, of course, I will be using my own custom game engine for my game engine.

However, my game engine is not doing very good right now!

Essentially, I wanted to make my game engine more component-based, as I’ve found the whole component-based model to be a pretty cool idea. However, there was so much stuff I wanted to fix that I decided I might as well rewrite the whole thing from the ground up. (This is a bad habit of mine).

The past week, however, I have been studying for finals (and I have a really busy school schedule anyways) so I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it, and because I am a procrastinator, I only really started working on it last weekend. 😛

So! My game will probably not have anything like physics in it this time.

Last time I did this, somebody had made a top-down medieval RPG. This seems like something I might want to do – and there’s a whole bunch of themes that work with it! Underground, Control the environment not the characters, “Wait, are we the bad guys?”, Running out of space, Save yourself, not the world, the list goes on and on…

I have this bad habit of voting for a theme that I don’t really like, but vote for anyways. This happened last time with Ancient Technology, and it won – so this time I actively avoided doing that. The theme that stuck out to me as “I should vote for this even though I don’t like it” is “Control the environment not the characters” so that’s my prediction for which theme is going to win. If I’m right, well, at least it’s not actually a bad theme – I just don’t really like it because it sounds hard to do, and my game engine, is, again, not very great. 😛

Finally, because I know I will probably need it as well, good luck to everybody! 😀

After seven hours, six of which I was working on this, I have…

*drumroll*

A background.

That’s it. That, right there folks, is a 6-hour background (for an untalented pixel artist – I’m sure there are faster ways to accomplish the same thing, such as writing a program to do a lot of the work).

The lava also moves. However, I didn’t want to upload a gif, because the lava takes 800 frames to complete one cycle – that’s an 8 megabyte gif. 😛

—

My game idea is pretty simple. I wanted to make an RPG this time, and I’m rolling with it. Basically, this is a dungeon, and, as would be expected, there will be monsters. (It will be a bit more complicated than that, but I don’t want to spoil it – especially if it turns out I can’t accomplish everything I want to in terms of story :P).

The last time I knew exactly what type of game I wanted to make before the theme was announced was my first Ludum Dare, where I made a pretty lame sandbox game. Hopefully this one will turn out quite a bit better.

This went a lot faster than the background 😉

The player controls the King’s top engineer, who has accidentally locked himself in an experimental new dungeon. All he has is his trusty (invisible ;)) bow and his wits to fight off the horde of monsters that will soon arrive…

(at least, that is the plan… :P)

Also, sorry that the image is blurry – WordPress doesn’t seem to like it when I try to make it scale non-AA.

Every good RPG needs slimes.

Also, standing by the lava drains health.

Skeletons are the newest enemy to arrive in my dungeon.

Kill the skeleton mini-boss (spawns in randomly) and you can wear his crown!

Here’s a short gif (or something, this is the first time I’ve used imgur :P) showing (some of) my current progress.

View post on imgur.com

It doesn’t show everything – the player also, right now, has a lightning ability that pierces all enemies, a nova ability, arrows that make enemies fight for you, and arrows that do extra damage. There is also one other enemy type that is much smarter than the others and shoots at you.

Things on the to-do list:

• Main menu
• Music
• SFX
• Two player abilities that have not yet been implemented
• One mini-boss that has not yet been implemented
• Player level system that works
• Enemy waves laid out logically & fun to play

In any case, it’s 4:20 here so I should be getting to bed.

I made some repetitive music for my game! I probably won’t have time to make it any better. 😛

This post is being made late: I submitted my game yesterday around seven, but I was too tired of messing with it to write this post. 😛

Just so it’s clear: it is a compo entry.

It is called “Dungeon 2.0,” and, essentially, is a combination between a medieval RPG, complete with leveling up and skill trees, and a classic arcade-style game – in this case, it’s merely “try not to die,” because I was too lazy to implement a score at the end.

Here’s a webm: (the gif source for this is 70mb :P)

If you wish to play my game, you can find it here. It’s probably my best Ludum Dare game,  and I think that’s because it actually has replay value – most of my other better games were still not very fun after they had been played all the way through.

I do want to port this game to Android, and I’ve started, sort of, but I’m not sure if that’ll actually happen for a while.

I would also really appreciate feedback about how well this game is balanced – I tried to balance it a bit at the end, but I think it’s still somewhat unbalanced. If you find some part of it way too easy or way too hard, please let me know! Thanks!