Cancel Christmas!

After a hard couple of days, I finally submitted my entry. In it you play an evil hacker intent on breaking into Santa’s Grotto and deleting the naughty list from his secure server (gasp!).

It’s a pure puzzle game, since I didn’t have time to add any enemies or dangers, but it’s a bit different to most puzzle games. I thought that since everybody rating my game would be a developer, I could tailor my game to my audience and make one that required a pretty good programming knowledge to pass various hacking challenges. There are challenges related to SQL injection, buffer overflows and integer overflows.

 

I’m extremely pleased with the result, but I’m slightly concerned that it might be a bit too hard, particularly if you’ve never looked at computer security before. Still, if even one person gets to the end, I’ll consider it a roaring success.

I’m going to be participating this weekend in what will be my fifth compo. I’ll be using

• My own pygame skeleton / framework thing that uses opengl for graphics, it’s up on github here
• Renoise for music

I’ve completed an entry in each of the last four compos, so I think that means I’m not being ambitious enough! This time I’m hoping to try something a bit more crazy and unorthodox, hopefully following the hacking / cyberpunk styles I’ve enjoyed doing in my previous entries (provided that it fits with the theme of course).

Good luck everyone

I just submitted “The GOSH signal”, a niche game about digital signal processing that is only very subtly linked to the theme. It’s my fifth entry, but the closest I’ve come to not making it.

The original idea was to make it a bit like Gone Home, (because Gone Home is awesome), but throw in some computers you could hack around on. I didn’t really think it through though, since Gone Home relies on a wealth of content for atmosphere, and 2 days is barely enough time to get a game mechanic together let alone fill the world with rich content, doh!

I was also disappointed with how similar it was looking to a previous game of mine, “Cancel Christmas”, that also involved a 2D world with computers. I very nearly threw in the towel, but now I’m glad I didn’t! A frenzy of activity on Sunday allowed me to end with a game that, if not exceptionally happy with, at least I’m not embarrassed by. By including a noir style voiceover I added some distance between my last game and this one and added some humour to boot.

Since I’ve never struggled to finish before, I find I’m appreciating it much more this time, and I’m really excited about rating some games in the weeks to come!

Sixth compo coming up, and I’m exceptionally excited! Again I’ll be using my pygame base code

, which I haven’t touched at all since the last compo

I had a very tough time last time, mainly due to not being sufficiently innovative and producing a game to similar to one of my previous games. This time I want to try something crazy and different, even if it doesn’t succeeed.

One of the things that bummed me out about the site move was losing the nice page with all my games in one place. I had 15 (in a row!) on ludumdare.com, and having them be split really sapped my motivation.

The old site being removed was another blow, so I decided to go onto the Internet Archive and save all my old games, repackage them and upload them to itch.io. Now all 18 of my Ludum Dare games are finally in the same place and I'm ready to join in for 53. Bring it on!