So this will be my first year participating in the Ludum Dare challenge. And it’s exciting and scary to think about. I have an idea of what type of game I will be trying to make. I’m gonna have some trouble with the music and sound affects and a lot of trouble with debugging. I made a game in about 36 hours or so.  That wasn’t to bad, but I’m looking to step it up.  If you have any words of encouragement or tips they are much apperciated.

My tools are very simple I don’t use anything fancy. I use eclipse CDT, and notepad to write my code, GIMP  and MS Paint to make my art. As for music I have yet to decide a tool, but as for sound effects I use audacity. The graphics library I use is called SFML http://www.sfml-dev.org/ it’s a light weight graphics library, good for making things quickly. All my other libraries are libraries that I have built off of SFML specifically for GUI’s.

I’ve made some decent head way on my game. I’m about to finish the cut scene that tells the story and how I connected my game to the theme. Then I just need to add in asteroids and suns and maybe other gpm’s to fight. The I’m pretty close to being done. Just spiffying things up and making awesome sound effects and music. Here is my wanna be billboard screen shot

by the way the poster says “who you calling tiny?”, “geo praderia maximus”

I’ll release a codex for this font soon.. not that it will help much 😛

Well I just now finished editing my time lapse it took forever to speed it up, So I wasn’t able to put it on my entry page. But here it is now. Enjoy. P.S. this is my first LD I’m super proud.. A lot of hard work though.

time lapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCPDaIWhjqc

entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10665

I will be participating in ludum 24 it will be my second LD competition depending on if I can get it together I might be doing the jam with one of my friends, other wise I will be doing the 48 hour compo.

Tools:

Language: C++
IDE: Eclipse CDT
Libraries: SFML 1.6, OpenGL, SME, VCON
Pandora…
Art: Gimp, MsPaint
Sound: sfxr, some form of music gen, audacity

Heads up SME and VCON are a bit janky because they were made by me, they are still works in progress I have been working on newer much more refined versions of them. However they wont be ready for LD 24 you can find them here.

SME: link

VCON: link

I’ll be using c++ with sfml2 in sublime text 2 graphics will be made in gimp and sounds made with audacity with things I have on hand. This is all assuming I’m not on a plane before 5 o’clock  (the time the theme is released for me) I’ll try my best to get it from a friend with a text, and maybe just maybe if I have to I’ll use that crappy airplane internet for a few minutes. Sadly I wont be doing a time lapse this year since I’ll be using my laptop, instead of my much more powerful desktop. I have a lot more coding experience under my belt now, and should be able to follow the rule of getting something playable as fast as possible, welp, cheers.

So since I’m going to be on a plane to Tennessee for most of tomorrow I knew I had to make a ton of progress today, So thus far I’ve busted my ass making the map reader and terrain and such. and so far it works! no I’m going to work on map querying and movement and we will be good. Here are some pictures of the map/map reader and terrain tiles.

So what’s my plan for the game. Well I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be Dr. Wily setting up these bases full of enemies to combat his foe megaman. Well now my game offers you and myself that chance you to can become a phd of evil and plan out your defenses against the hero.

So basically it’s a 2d side scroller tower defense.

oh yea heres a picture of my setup (for tonight):

So this is one of my henchmen/minion designs I have a few others but I haven’t sprited them yet. I’ve almost finished the code for handling minions and I’m happy to say that it makes that part of my game modable. (you can add your own minions, as long as your plans for them aren’t to complicated) you can also make your own maps. onward into the last 21 hours of ludum!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10665

So now that it’s been a full day after the end of ludum and I’ve had time to relax and think about what went right – and respectively what went wrong – here is what I have to say, and what I’ve learned.

What went right:
1) I finished LD for the second time!

2) I created a full on 2d side scrolling tower defense.

3) The game is moddable – you can add you’re own towers and levels with specific settings.

What went wrong:

1) I finished with ~10 minutes to spare.

2) I had to “roll my own tech”

3) Compile times were hideous since I didn’t have .o files to work with – new tools.

4) No music – except for the opening which is a garage band loop.

What I learned:

1) If I want to make another ambitious game like this for LD I need to use a preexisting game engine/library that I or some one else has made.

2) I need tools that allow for compiling only changed code or hot coding.

3) I need to not be traveling in the midst of LD

4) modding saves your ass after the fact, because you can add content.

5) videos are cool – but I already knew that 😉

So here is my post mortem video where I show off my game and talk a bit. The audio is a ‘lil – maybe a lot off sync at the begging but fixes it’s self.

I’m joining the ludum dare jam this time, contrary to my previous two entries. Which were in the 48 hour challenge. I’ll be participating with my friend Porthog. We will be using:

IDE: Eclipse, Sublimetext2
Language: C++
Libraries: Sfml 2.0, Box2d
Sound: Audacity, sfxr, (some random music gen)
Graphics: mspaint, gimp

Food: pizza, soda.

We are looking to make our game multi player this year, but I guess that depends, there are a lot of “alone” like themes this year.

So I my friend and I who are participating in the ludumdare jam may or may not have bit off more than we can chew. Either way it is slowly moving along it is playable but not a whole lot to it, I guess that’s minimalist. It networks, and you can have as many people as you like on the server. You can shoot bullets, you can hit people with bullets, you can kill people with bullets. I still need to implement a queue for respawning instead of just instantly respawning. I need to add sound effects. Map collision needs to be done, sending the map initially over the network. Kill counter per player. Game over at 10 kills. map cycle. those are my goals but others it’s getting there. I’ll be hosting a server when we finish it, so yea 😛

Libelle is finally operational, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. Libelle is probably my most successful ludum dare entry to date. The multiplayer works pretty ding dang well, which I’m surprised with my self considering this is my first time writing a real server/client system. My friends actually thought it was pretty playable even when they had 230-300 ping (they are in NZ while I’m in california.)

Libelle is a game where you are a box that shoots other boxes. The first box to 5 kills wins the round and the next round begins! Here is some game play footage.

You can download Lieble here, Windows and Linux are supported!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10665

I’m currently hosting a server at: 67.188.172.220:6080

come play with me, and others!

So this has probably been my best ludum dare this far. I’ve made a ton of progress the first 5 hours I made the editor and then I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning spent about 2 hours fixing up the editor a little bit more with sounds. 😉 Then I started working on the actual game part. I’ve gotten it to the point where the ship points to the mouse, you can move the ship and the ship shoots. I haven’t implemented the power system. But extra rockets are implemented. I also started working on the enemies however thier AI so far is pretty bad, they kind of just blunder about into stuff at high speeds shooting in your general direction, but I guess it works for now.

So here is the low down of what my game is:

Earth is under attack by an alien race, so you and your crack team of engineers have been told to build a space ship to defend earth. But your deadline is only ten seconds from now! So you open up some crates and slap together a ship as best you can.

There are 8 unique parts that you can build your ship with Lazers, Cannons, Missile Pods, Batteries, Shields, Cockpits, Hulls. Each part does something different for your ships stats. Cannons and Missiles Pods will shoot continuously, Missile Pods shot slower bullets, but three of them at a time where as cannon bullets are pretty fast but only one is shot. Lazers can be shot by clicking and they shoot very rapidly, however they consume energy. Batteries give your ship more energy however energy is finite. Shields will stop your ship from taking damage however they consume energy as well. The more cockpits you have on your ship the faster your Cannons and Missile Pods shoot. Hull increases the durability of your ship.

And finally the goal of the game is to get the most score by destroying as many alien ships before you die, or run out of energy!

Here are some picks:

It’s pretty much all coming together. Must of gui is still there although I have to finish the main menu, options, and help page. I also want the user to be able to set names for their ship for the scoreboard which will be temporarily local. If I have time I’ll make an online scoreboard or maybe I’ll do it postmortem. But for now here is a video of gameplay. btw the cannons shoot potatoes 😀

So I struggled for a little bit coming up with ideas, but I guess that’s almost how all ludum dares start, but eventually I think I came up with a pretty good one. Originally what I was thinking about was motherload, but I figured that would be pretty generic and kind of done, but I went and played the game for a few minutes to try and determine what I liked about it. I decided that I liked collecting ores and saving up to upgrade my ship the most. I fell back on some things I’ve learned about game design from this rather lengthy post http://mm.soldat.pl/development-log/triple-a-the-story-of-kag-and-link-dead it talks about the atoms of a game “the core elements” as it were. You should at most 3 core elements I decided my core elements were mining/collecting (you need to mine to collect), movement (you need to move your character around the world), upgrading (upgrade the stats of your player, speed, storage fighting.) I tried to think of a few games based around these “atoms”, but finally I settled on one game idea that I rather liked. It seemed like if I finished it, it would be a fun, fast passed game with collecting and upgrading. 😛

The basic idea is that you start at a space station (in the middle of the world) the vast emptiness of space is filled with mineral rich asteroids. You as a miner for the space station must shuttle to the various asteroids and bust them to smithereens and collect the resources. However some asteroids may hold dangers like exploding, monsters, exploding monsters, secret pirate bases. As a mining vessel you can’t really defend yourself against these dangerous so you must fly back to the space station and have it defend you with it’s powerful cannons. At the space station you can also upgrade your ship and buy items. Upgrades: Ship speed, Mining speed, Cargo storage, Fuel. Items: defense drone, teleporter, extra fuel, shield, bomb. The goal of the game is simple stay alive as long as possible, and collect as many resources as possible. In order to stay alive you must refuel at the space station and evade pirates and raiders who want the space stations minerals.

Here is my mock up of the mining ship.

For now I haven’t done to much gameplay I’ve just been putting together the engine, it’s almost finished though. So I’m feeling pretty confident and optimistic at this point, although I’m sure that will change soon. (I might have change to doing the Jam, because I may have a large chunk of time taken out of my next couple of days.)

I had a rather busy day today. I spent most of it helping my sister move her stuff to her new house. It seems more and more lately that each ludum dare I get less and less time to work on my game. But each ludum dare I seem to keep on pulling out a better and better game, I guess I’m growing as a gamedev. That said, it wasn’t until about an hour after the 1 day mark that I got something rendering. I put a lot of work into the engine… probably to much. But the hope is that it will let me focus on gameplay – the hope -. Right now I have a mining ship that you can fly around using the keyboard and mouse or an xboxcontroller, and I have randomly spawned asteroids of different sizes with and without crystals. Here are some screenshots of the game so far.

It’s not to much yet .. as you can see by the lack of ui/background, but at least I have something despite all the time that I lost today, I might be moving to the jam, because I think this game really deserves some good time on it before I submit it.

Btw here are the art assets I made for the asteroids:

All my assets are made using inkscape, I decided it might be fun to use vector art this LD, so I practiced for the day or two before hand. And I think it’s turning out pretty awesome!

As I figured I would have to extend to the jam time. I still had to do a lot of packing and moving helping out my sister. Otherwise the game has made a lot of progress, the second main game element is finished, mining asteroids/collecting crystal. The first element having been movement. Finally I need to implement upgrades/refueling/items/enemies it sounds like a lot, but it honestly shouldn’t take to much longer. I added a bunch of particle handling today it makes the game look pretty! 😛 Gotta do all the other game elements and add sound then I think I will be done. For now here are some screen shots until I release!

Today was move in day at my university. So I was quite busy today. Luckily I made some art last night before heading off to bed. I’ve gotten in about my first hour and half of programming and I’m ok with it, platforms with collision and a moveable character.

To be honest I’m not entirely sure what this games mechanics are supposed to be or how I’m supposed to get it done. I kind of imagined  a kirbyish thing where you eat flowers to change what power you have (which I’ve gotten done). But I’m not sure how to fit that into the rest of the game because I was also imaging a kind of bounce down game. Hahaha. Oh well I’ll try and wing it tomorrow.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Current playable version: http://verra.xyz/2direction/

Welp, I decided I would try something different this LD. So I’m not using c++/sfml this time. I ended up using processing which I’m pretty proficient with, and I’m also using the processing.js library to put up an html5 version of the game.

The concept of the game is just a simple puzzle platformer except you can only move left and right. So far it’s turning out really well. I’m surprising myself with how much level design and depth I can pull out of only having 2 directions to move. Tomorrow I’ll be making more levels, mechanics and putting in some art/sound.