… create a game in 48 hours!

I recently reduced my fulltime position to a part-time job, to start my try as a somewhat more serious game dev. This is 4 months ago. Now, after releasing my first game for android and several prototypes (I whish I was able to finish more of them to a game!) I feel like I have enough routine to take part in ludum dare for the first time.

I will be using the great Entity-System-Framework Artemis (if you haven’t thought about Entity-System-Frameworks for game development check out their references) and libgdx. This means I will work on a PC and an Android version. I might port everything to html5 next week. I haven’t used libgdxs HTML5 target yet, so I don’t know how much work it will be – but it would surely be a nice thing to have. Other tools I use will be Gimp2.8 (Much better since they have the one-window-mode) and inkscape and of course good old eclipse.

I am currently trying to figure out if I should manage my sleep (which is somewhat difficult given the starting time of 3AM here in Germany) or if I should just keep working until my sugar-free energy drinks run out.

However, I wish us all much fun and great games!

Right now I feel like I could get this to an acceptable state until tonight. Let’s see how long that state persists.

The goal of the game will be to cultivate a plant that survives for five minutes in a hazardous (rain, heat, snow) environment by selectively planting and harvesting plants. Bees (or better some kind of firefly) fly around and bring genetic material from plant to plant. Pollinated blossoms grow fruits that contain the plants genetic material (its resistances) that can be harvested by the player and used to grow new plants using that seed. Something along that lines. I am still finetuning the gameplay and hope to be done with that soon, so I can start making sounds and record some nice piano sounds for the background music. Hope you are all doing fine! (Sorry for all the mistakes, I am super tired :-))

Here are two more screenshots:
Click

This is my entry:
Firefly

I took a very conservative approach to the theme. How much closer to evolution can one get but with fireflies (read bees) and flowers? My initial idea was “The-Darwin-Award game – kill yourself as dumb and creative as possible” but I couldn’t make up any details fast enough, so I chose fireflies. I am currently working on a web-version, but I havent used libgdxs HTML5-target yet, so I don’tt know how long that will take. I will put the Android version online very soon too. I just need to make the code a bit more smartphone friendly (garbage collector isn’t your friend). This was my first LD and I have barely slept. It was both fun and horror, but I am very happy that I was able to finish something. Thank you all for a great community!

Link to my LD-Entry Firefly

I don’t want to present a list of good and bad things, so I’ll take a bit more of a narrative approach to my post mortem (although english is not my native language)

The Idea – and how bad at drawing I am

This is my first Ludum Dare entry. I didn’t really know what to expect from myself, and the first few hours after theme anouncement, I was constantly switching between a “lets try just to have fun” and a “Lets see what is the best I can do in 48h” mood. I ended up somewhere in between and I felt very good doing things as I did them.

I had a very precise idea for an evolution based theme in my head but I took some time to make up some others to see if I could find a better one. The only one that I really came up with was  “The Darwin Award Game – Kill yourself as dumb and fast as you can” which I gave up on once I told my girlfriend about it and she only shook her head, saying nothing. So I decided to go for the “plants and bee’s”-theme.

I wasn’t really sure what the final mechanic should be like. I only knew that one fundamental process should be part of the game-play: Bee’s pollinating plants and mixing genes following rules similar to mendels-rules.

So the first thing I did was drawing a sketch of what a game-screen could look like. Here you see a comparisan graphics of what the sketch, and what the game that I finally submitted look like: (I am not good in drawing obviously, but for the amusement I’ll add the sketch anyways – and hey! It was 5 AM!).

 

The Programming

I had decided the day before theme announcement, that I would start with very sketchy placeholder graphics and spend the first 24hours coding. I would then start to create nicer graphics and add sounds to finally do some polishing. I stuck to that plan and dived right into an empty eclipse project that I had prepared with the libraries that I chose (Libgdx and Artemis Entity-System-Framework).  I planned to submit an Android and a java version of my game. That was important to plan upfront because I had to map all interactions to touch-input (at least in my head) when designing controls. Artemis proofed once again to be a perfect match for rapid development like it was required for LD. But I really feel very comfortable with libgdx and artemis anyway. (I ended up messing with the Entity-System pattern a bit when I had no time left and produced some not so good looking code :))

I think it helps a lot not to spend all the time with a new api or tool you haven’t tried before. Why do so many entries choose tools or libraries they never used before for a LD entry? It doesn’t sound like something fun for me (unless you need to give yourself a handicap because any bunch of numbers turn into an incredibly looking, sounding and playing game if you only look at them).

Sunday morning, I finished the last systems I felt mandatory to be present to… yes … to what? I realized in that moment that somehow I was still not really clear on what the gameplay should be like exactly. What I had was:

• Plants, growing blossoms (not really because the placeholder graphics didn’t look like it, but I knew what it could be like).
• Three slots where you could put a plant.
• A weather-system which would randomly spawn snow, rain or heat.
• Plants could die from weather that they were not resistant against.
• Bees were flying from plant to plant eating their pollen and pollinating other plants

If you played my game, this might sound familiar to you, because this sounds very similar to the games tutorial – for a reason.

The Game-Mechanics – or how I would first do something else

Not many things changed concerning the game play. Things that I introduced sunday morning to have at least something to work with was:

• The pollination process got a bit more complex (Mutation was added for example).
• Generic-Seeds that would give you some start-stats and are required to grow plants with new random stats were introduced.
• Blossoms were made harvestable after being pollinated so you could plant them and grow a new plant with the blossoms stats (which are independent of the plants base stats after being pollinated).
• Bees were renamed to fireflies (because bees suck).
• Bees could have stats attached when they entered the game that were random (to bring a bit more diversity into the whole setup).
• The player was able to smash fireflies if he didn’t want them to pollinate a plant with stats he didn’t like

That’s basically it. I didn’t think about what the gameplay would be like anymore because I couldn’t spontainously come up with something and just started to hope that I would stumble about a brilliant idea in the process of creating the assets. So I started creating graphics (I did them all in inkscape).

This is what the game looked like sunday early morning:

I started to work on the plants and played with different background graphics. It was fun to do, but I always had in mind that I still had not the perfect game-play that I wanted.

Another step in the process:

So you have seen in the beginning of my post what the game looked like in the end, so I won’t insert more screenshots. (Pro Tip: To find out what it really looks and sounds like, it’s helpful to play and rate the game ;-))

I finished most of the graphics around 5PM on Sunday (around 10 hours before the deadline) and started to search for the cables that I needed to record from my e-piano to my computer. That took a while (I drank far to many energie-drinks by that time – thats really a don’t. I could hardly concentrate and giggled like crazy for  a while…). Once I had calmed down again I recorded the music for the game (that was really a quick thing, I knew I didn’t have much time to work on it because there were several other things to be done). An hour later I had the music cut, and written a system that would load and play them in the game. I created some more sounds for selections and mutation on plants but ran out of time quickly so I couldn’t record sound effects for the weather or the fireflies for example (Would have liked to do that).

The Wake-Up-Call

Once these things were ready there was not much time left. Maybe 3 hours. I was really pleased with what the game looked like, given my drawing talent and the short time. But I was (and am) very unsatisfied with the gameplay. I mean its all fine, once you read the tutorial or found out what possible interactions are, it’s really playable. There is goal to achieve and there is actually quite some complexity involved in it (The goal is to cultivate a plant that survives 5 minutes) But when I was play-testing, I could hardly achieve that goal. There were two reasons for it:

1. The feedback loop was hardly present. As mdkess wrote in my games comments later: It was hard to figure out how good you were doing.
2. The game was actually to hard. The pollination process was rarely beneficial and you had only a low chance of a mutation to be beneficial either.

But the deadline got close and I knew I had not enough time to change the game to improve point 1. So all I could do was to insert an easy and a hard game mode. The hard game mode has all difficulties left as I describe them here. The easy mode really is much easier, so if you want a challenge, try the hard mode (though I suggest to start with easy mode to get to know the game). The other thing that I put into the game within the last hour before the end of the compo, was a tutorial. I really don’t like what it became like. Obviously I couldn’t integrate an interactive tutorial (which I usually like to do). So its just 10 screens filled with text and some spare graphics to explain everything. There is now a tutorial outside of the game that is a bit cleaner and easier to understand. I suggest to read that one 😉

 

So I guess now that I wrote so much about it I actually want to do a list :D:

What was gooooood

• Schedule was nearly perfect. Although some things are not as polished as I like them to be, I feel like I really spent my time on the right parts to have a full game done by the end of 48 hours.
• Programming was great. I really did some not so pretty things shortly before submission deadline, but that was not avoidable to get done.
• Idea to game conversion worked really good. Comparing my sketch with the result its actually not that far away from each other.
• Graphics and sounds are much better than I thought I could do.
• Porting the game to android was a matter of 60 minutes. Planning for an android release really paid off.
• Really not many bugs throughout development. If there were some, I found them fast and it didn’t take long to fix them.

What was baaaaaad:

• This whole game-play thing really sucked. Now, a few days later I really think the game-play itself is great, but it’s the lack of communication to the player that prevents it from shining.
• Too much caffeine. I know, there isn’t sth. like too much caffeine – but – yes there is.
• One of the libgdx extensions I used (freetype) has a bug which led to most of the first visitors of my game not being able to play it. Took a while to figure that out. In the end it wasn’t my fault, but I hated that people who wanted to try my game were unable to do so. (It should all be fixed  now).

Can’t think of anything more right now. Maybe I’ll remember sth. later and add it.

So much for my first Ludum Dare. Thanks for reading this, hope you found at least parts of it interesting.

Now go and play it if you haven’t

Best,

Tim

Link to my LD-Entry Firefly

… It will end with one more game made. I’m in!

It’s gonna be my second LD. The first was a blast, and I learned a lot from it and was really happy with my final ratings. It’s amazing what one person can do in 48 hours.

I have been looking forward to this LD since the moment I sent in my submission to LD24 and already am totally excited. Currently I am trying to prepare with some music editing and setting up an empty project with working buildpaths and stuff, so I can start right after waking up. I hope the theme is going to be “The end of the world” as I had a real flood of ideas when I read it for the first time.

I’ll be using:

Eclipse + LibGDX (I aim for having a desktop and android version sent in)

Artemis Entity Sysetm Framework Try it – love it – never look back

Cosmigo ProMotion for shoving pixels around

My E-Piano for the music. Maybe I’ll use some Virtuell instruments if just piano sounds aren’t sufficient. I like to keep it calm though.

I’ll record random stuff for sound effects this time and edit them with Audacity.  Last LD I was standing on my balkony at 4 AM totally drenched while trying to record the rain sounds with my phones audio recorder. All I got was a lot of noise – and a cold 😉

So have fun, and get it done. Looking forward to read you all and see some amazing games.

 

Here’s a screenshot from my WIP game with the preliminary, not decided on WIP title “Make a run for it”.

The game will be about your try to escape from some good guys (of course they are good, ’cause you are the villain!)

You’ve got to avoid line of sight and cameras and stuff. Got a lot of stuff working already, also some that is not in the screenshot. You can sneak around and silence the good guys from behind 😉

I hope to have a run tomorrow, so I’ll end with something nice. Took me a while to decide on what I wanna do. The initial idea was really different from what I ended up with 😉

I am really really happy that I have some kind of core mechanic done and that I can concentrate on content-generation and some nice music tomorrow.

I hope you all are having fun, whish you a good night

 

 

If you want to play a game that has a twisted side-plot about an imaginery goat in a recursive nightmare, read on!

I submited my game Makarun in time and I am actually quite content with what I got. At least given the fact that I did not like the theme at all.

I’ll write a more detailed post mortem tomorrow. But I wanted to let you know, that although it is not written in the games description, in the end its absugoatly about goats.

Here’s my entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341
Gratulations to all fellow campaigners who took part in the compo!

Yesterday shortly after submission deadline I was too tired to post more than my post presenting a twisted side-plot about an imaginery goat in a recursive nightmare

Today after some game voting and some nice feedback on my own game I made a video with a walkthrough for easy and normal difficulty for my entry “Makarun”.

There is also a hard-mode. But I only did complete hard-mode a few times myself, and did not record it.

Game description from my entries page:
You are the bad guy, making a run (makarun) for it. On your escape from jail you have to evade the good guys or take them down brutally. It’s a stealth-action-game in 2d that makes extensive use of dynamic lights to visualize and check lines of sight. Also makes things much prettier 😉
So if you are interested, I would be happy to see your comment showing up on my entries page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341
I will rate every game showing up in my comments soon or later.

Recent post about my game with a video

 

The theme

As many others, I was sure. 100% sure “End of the world” would make it as the theme.
LD started at 3AM local time here, and I was honestly tired, shocked and disappointed when I read that its “You are the villain”.

The idea

I started from scratch thinking about a game I could make. All I knew was that I wanted to make use of box2dlights which I had discovered a few days before and which I adapted to some extend by playing around with the shaders. I came up with an idea after an hour or so. I thought about being evil and remembered my last neighbour who was a huge douche-bag. I remembered how I got really mad after a few months of fights with him and what thoughts where roaming my head during that time – they weren’t nice and definitely not rated as E-for everyone but more E as in evil. So I thought my game could be something like this:
You are a nice guy actually, getting into a fight with your new neighbour. As you become more angry, you start to do acts of evil to him.

The game-play

The actual game-play would be that you sneak around his house and garden and manipulate things to play evil tricks on him (plug his toilet, trample his plants, poison his bird, …). While you do that he would be roaming the area and have a cone of light indicating his field of view. You would have to avoid being caught by him. For each evil act you would unlock new things to do,eventually even new rooms in his house, in which you could free the villain in you. While the neighbour roams around, he would start yelling and play funny animations while he rages. All this was planned to happen from a top-down (birds-eye) view. The game would end by you killing him. In the final act.
So much for the plan.

The creation – day 1

I decided to use a tiled map for the layout as I have some kind of work-flow that should help me speeding up things. What I had not done is integrating physics with it. I used tiled-map editor and drew the physical borders over the map and had to make my game (java, libgdx) create physical bodies at the right position perfectly aligned with the tiles drawn. This took a while as I made some really mind blocking mistakes at that time. But well … I had barely slept, had a Christmas party the night before (did leave at 4AM, so not much sleep) and this was the result. So after two or three hours I had the work-flow reestablished and started to implement all the other stuff.

I used placeholder gfx for everything until ~15hours after theme announcement. I started adding some rotating cone-lights which was easily done, and wrote some code to make a playable character and some “are you in the light”-detection stuff. I started creating some ugly graphics and put everything together.

After adding the neighbour with some simple path-following, I realised what a massive amount of content I would have to create within the next 24 hours to make my concept enjoyable and got really frustrated. But I had to sleep by that time anyway. So I thought I might have an idea the next morning.

The creation – day 2

The next morning I warned myself, not to do the same mistake as last LD. Last time I had my game mechanics not settled until an hour before the deadline, which made me finish a lot of other things in a hurry (thus resulting in bad quality, like a wall-of-text-tutorial). I wanted it to be done earlier this time so I could actually polish things and have nice graphics and music. I decided that I had to change directions a bit to get that done. I threw away the neighbour concept. That was a hard step because I really liked this take on the theme. I felt like it would be nice to have the villain being just an ordinary guy like you and me, turning into a “monster” (very breaking bad style).

Instead I focused on what I already had, and that was the sneaking around and not being detected and line-of-sight part. I changed the setting from “house and neighbour” to “Villain in jail on a run”.  I had not created many graphics yet, so content wise, it wasn’t that bad. I had used tiled only to place all my meta-data in the “neighbours house” so it was relatively easy to generate a completely new map with more than one enemy. I added some security-cameras that would rotate between to specified angles with a specified cone-angle. By being able to place and define all these things (including the paths for the AI jail-guards) I was able to get some concept done quickly. Here’s a screen of what the map looked like in tiled-map editor with all the meta-data at a later point in time (click to enlarge):

I added mouse-over items that would explain game mechanics and some basic storyline about you waking up in jail after an intense dream of a goat that betrayed you. (You should play the game to see what this leads to). I added the ability to kill guards while not being detected and some kind of jump/dash that would make you move forward quickly to escape the view of cameras and guards. I think at that point I felt like the main game mechanics had been done. I created three difficulties that unlock once you have completed the preceding map. I had some nice to have features on my trello-board but thought I might postpone them and work on assets and music first.

The audio

I spent around 2 hours to compose a main theme for the game. If you like you can listen to it in my dropbox folder: PLAY. I used Reaper for the first time together with some free virtual orchestral instruments and my Korg SP-250. This worked very well although I didn’t know the software well. I added some percussion sounds that are played when you get caught but other than that I couldn’t find a way to produce nice foot-stepping and attack sounds. As this is a stealth-game I found it not so bad to have the main character not producing noise. I still am not really missing the sounds much. But I might add some in a post-compo version.

Well that’s basically it. I produced all animations with pro motion which I had bought and learned a few weeks ago, and I start feeling comfortable with it. Oh and as with my last LD I used Artemis Entity System Framework instead of a classical component-based approach and this is still my preferred way to do things in games. I haven’t come along the game that I wouldn’t want to implement with this pattern. If you haven’t heard of Entity Systems as a design pattern – give it a try and wrap your head around it 😉

So instead of a time-lapse here is a short animation showing screenshots of different stages in the development (click to enlarge, but ignore the compression artefacts please ;):

 

One last paragraph about controls

A lot of people in the comments on my LD page, say that they have problems with the control scheme that I defined. When you press W, you walk in the direction of your mouse-cursors position. If you press space, you jump into your mouse cursors direction.  I did a mistake that I didn’t realize until release in that pressing A and D doesn’t make you strafe orthogonal to your orientation, but in a circle around the mouse cursor (this part actually is really weird). I suggested in my games description not to use A+D at all. In fact I haven’t used them at all, which is why I didn’t recognize the wrong movements.

Yesterday I started porting the whole thing to android. It’s running smooth on Tegra2 devices, but even without android specific performance tuning I had it running at 30FPS on my desire hd. Given this input scheme it actually fits very well to touch input. Maybe I was influenced by that when I made it the way it is now.

What I would like to ask you, in case you play the game and plan to leave a comment: Could you please suggest a way of control that would suit you better? I can hardly think of one, so I need some input. Thanks in advance and please rate my game, i’ll definitly rate yours.

Oh, and it has a goat. 

And English is not my first language

Makarun: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341

TL;DR

What went well:

• Using the right tools that I was familiar with
• Concentrating on the mechanics before spending much time on assets
• Using Trello to stay focused
• Isolating myself for two days to concentrate
• Using Artemis Entity System Framework
• Not drinking as much energy drinks as I did last time – I switched to tea.

What went wrong:

• I was very tired the first day because I had partied to long on a Christmas party on Thursday.
• I defined my scope wrong initially but was able to adjust on the second day without much trouble
• I really should have added at least a second control scheme, but I wasn’t aware of it during development
• I made myself too much pressure because I was really overwhelmed by my placement in the last LD
• No breaks. I should have stopped every now and then, if even only for a short break.
• Adding static lights for the map in tiled was a bad idea because I had no preview implemented and had to restart the game on each change.

… someone is planning to stick with the goat theme. Android is already on that train:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManager.html#isUserAGoat()

Hey there!

I planned this to be a short project for my february OneGameAMonth but some things came into my way. Now its my entry (my first entry though) for march.

In the end I did a lot more work on this than I wanted to initially, but I personally think it was worth it. I am planning to give the libgdx HTML5 exporter a try too with this game, although it plays better with touch controls. So here it is! I am looking forward to any comments and feedback!

Oh, and it’s for free

 

I am not warmed up. I am burning!
I spent two evenings and made this game for warmup. I really got lost with particles. They are sooo much fun!

Click here to play the game!

The background music is the first music I ever made with sunvox (which was basically what I spent the first evening on). If I don’t use sunvox for the music, I will play something on my e-piano as for my first LD entry.

Guess I am ready now. So this also means:
I am in!

I will try to be even more focused on the gameplay and a coherent game loop than last time (I hated the last theme btw. And now there’s “You are the enemy” in the theme list? seriously? Give me potato!)

But back to topic:

It’ll be my third time and I participated in the last MiniLD.
I’ll be using some base code that contains some very basic systems for rendering and stuff based on artemis entity framework. I uploaded it here.

I’ll be using libgdx, artemis, universal tween library and if I decide to do some physics stuff I might also end up using box2dlights.
Also I might use:
cosmigo pro motion
inkscape
spine
sunvox

One of my workmates is also taking part this time. It’s the first time for him and I’m hoping to make im an addict too 😉

I whish everybody tons of fun! Looking forward to playing your games.

I made a video for my game to give you a brief impression of the visual style and the core gameplay.

It has more to offer than you can see in the video, but you’d have to find that out on your own

Oh and the music in the background is actually in the game and was recorded during the 48 hours. If you like what you see or want to jump directly into the game instead of watching a video

this is a link to my games entry page

Going to do a post mortem tomorrow

Screenshot taken from my game. The eye is the “main character” you controll.

MONO is an art inspired game that I think is pretty relaxing. You control an eye through a series of levels which feature puzzle and skill based elements.

You can watch a video at the end of the post or play it on my entries page.

So here’s how it went for me:

Day 1:

---

I had a really hard time to come up with a good idea. I changed my game-mechanic again and again because several times I felt like hitting a wall. This was until the end of the first day when I decided to use all the features that I had implemented during the first day and to make the best of it. Not the best way to do a game.

But in retrospective that was the best thing I could do because I had quite some stuff working already.

So what I had were some not too exciting level elements like bouncy walls, gravity zones (that’s probably one of the more interesting elements), teleporters and triggerable spinning doors. So all I could do is some best-I-can level design to turn it into something good.

I really hated my game, and the theme, and everything by that time. Luckily that did change.

I started to use Tiled as my level editor but didn’t use the tiles at all. But it also has some nice meta layer facilities to create objects that are not tile based. I created layers for all kind of objects and was able to get up a level design workflow by the end of the day.

A screen showing the map in tiled and the final result with lighting on the right.

Day 2:

---

I had an amazing amount of time left to do level design, music and sounds and polishing. So my goal was to have a few levels that aren’t repetitive and I wanted each of them to look like a painting that fits the theme. The “main character” became an eye as I imagined the level to be a painting.

So it’s like the viewers eye in the painting is starring back at the viewer, cause it’s all about reflection. Or something like that 😉

Being in that mood I started recording the music that you can hear in the game with my Korg e-piano, Reaper and the awesome Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra VST. I could have used just an actual recording of the e-piano instead of MIDI and VST but that wouldn’t have been so easy to edit. I jammed like 3 hours and ended up using the recordings that I did in the first minutes of the music session. But it was a lot of fun

I spent the rest of the time with level design and exploration of good looking color palletes. I did a lot of polishing and minor tweeks to give the game a nice feeling and I am quite content with the result. Most people who played it think so too, I am really happy about that.

Some screenshots and menu gfx from MONO

Bottom line

---

I used
libgdx, artemis entity framework,box2dlights,universal tweenengine,sfxr, reaper, cosmigo pro motion,tiled and a bunch of energy drinks.

What was bad:

• I had the very strong intent to know what the gameplay exactly will be, before I start coding. That didn’t work.
• I was in a rather bad mood on the later part of the first day.
• I wish I had been able to do a more clever game for the theme.
• There’s one or two places in the levels that are unnecessarily hard. But the game has no unlocking system or linear progression so you could just skip a level if you find it too frustrating.

What was good:

• Entity systems rock in so many ways!
• I was able to bring together all the parts and make a game I like
• I think the game fits the theme very well as the game elements, the art, as well as the controls are quite minimal and basically it was all inspired by minimalistic art.
• My game has no level that is white, has black lines and red and blue rectangles. Still it has Mondrian elements.
• LD reminded me once again how unbelievable much one can do in 48h.
• I made it so that the player can choose the sequence he/she wants to play the levels in. So if you can’t beat a level or don’t like it, choose a different one. I think that many games should do it like this especially in something like LD where time to rate is short and you want people to see as much of a game as possible. I think that avoids a lot of frustration and if your game allows for it, do it.

So here is a short video showing small parts of the game and if you like you can play it

on my entries page.

Just another I am in post with some details on my plans.

Planning to do an

• Online RTS that is played by AI vs. AI.
• You can only influence the game by playing cards (similar to a CCTG)
• Cards could for example allow you to give the AI an order to attack globally. But others could just be a damage boost for all “your” units or could allow you to spawn a huge robot in the middle of your opponents base
• Playing cards will probably cost you the same ressources that your AI uses to build your base and units (classy approach here) so you can’t just spam powerful cards
• Trying to do this in real time as opposed to round based as the AI vs AI concept might actually help making the network stuff easier due to its deterministic nature.
• Besides the network stuff AI is going to be the toughest challenge for me I guess
• The overall scope is probably far too large but I’ll try to make a minimalistic prototype that I extend into a more complex game

Hope you all have some fun reinventing (or re-implementing) the RTS genre

What you see (in a correct aspect ratio if you go fullscreen):
Two agents playing the game:

• Finding a spot for a harvestor building
• Building a harvestor-building
• Producing a harvestor
• harvesting some green stuff
• building more harvestors to harvest more stuff
• until maximum number of harvestors is reached

Done today:

• Basic Server and client code
• A lobby (not shown in the video) with options to create and join games
• A* Pathing (might also try greedy best first search tomorrow, we’ll see)
• A very simple agent system that I should be able to extend into something more fancy
• Some placeholder gfx and lots of sand
• A minimap

The final maps could be much larger and I am looking forward to start building barracks tomorrow. I hope to be able to get some simple card system as in my draft here implemented by late tomorrow. I got a lot of ideas during the day how the card system could actually work. I hope it’s working out as I imagine it.

Happy coding everybody!

I am in!

My basecode

I will use :

• libgdx
• maybe artemis entity framework
• my brain
• reaper and some free vst synths for music and sound effects and maybe bfxr
• energy drinks
• Esoteric Software Spine (Never really used it before, but always want to)
• Inkscape or cosmigo pro motion for gfx

 

Play sine HERE

I finally ported my entry sine to Android. I changed the tutorial to reflect the controls and had to do some minor changes (mainly things that explicitly referenced keystrokes).

It really hurts to dig back into the code and leave all things that I know didn’t work the way I wanted them to be unchanged. I’ll have to do a post compo version to get that burden of me

I tested it to run fine on a nexus 4 and a Desire HD. It should be safe to play on devices with resolutions of 800×480 and up. If you have a smaller screens you may try it but are probably better off playing the desktop version.

Still streaming!

I’ll review games whose makers are in the chat with priority over others. Currently there are none, so if you login to twitch and let me know your games URL (either via the form or in chat) I’ll play your game right now!

If you like, add your game to the reviewing queue on:

http://ldgames.timtips.com

Hope to see you on stream 

http://www.twitch.tv/timtipgames

Give me all your animals!

Quite some people were aided by their pets during this LD. I made bookmarks of all cat pictures and videos that I found during the LD but I was somehow busy creating a game so I might have missed some. Also I would like to extend this to all animals not only cats!

I am planning to do a collection of all animal images, videos and stories that have been created during this LD.

If you did a somehow animal and LD related post or picture or video during the LD please post a link to it in the comments of this post so I can add them to the collection. I will post all of it here once it’s done Thanks in advance and meow!