We (a team of two), are very excited to be a part of our second Ludum Game Jam.
Our Tools:
Programming: C# with XNA 4.0
Art: Paint.NET
Sound: Audacity
Best of luck to all our fellow developers.
One day down, two to go. We’re almost done programming all of the major features of our project, and have gotten started on some nice artwork for it.
We’re quite happy with how we’re handling the theme 
Best of luck to all our fellow developers on Day 2.
Coming up to the final day for the Jam. We’re done with programming and about 80% done the art now. We also ended up deciding on using Wolfram tones to get some decent sounding music for our game, so audio is coming along slowly but surely. Tomorrow will be finishing art, doing a few new sounds, polishing some things up and balance/tweaks.
Another creature from the game.
We’re in for this year’s October Challenge. We’re planning to release our Ludum Dare 23 entry (with a variety of tweaks, additions, and improvements) No Air Out Here. We’re aiming for both a PC release, and either shortly after, or at the same time, releasing an Xbox Live Indie Game version. We already have the project finished to our liking, and we’re currently working on producing the game trailer, and doing the other work necessary for it’s release. We’re hoping to have the trailer finished by the end of next week, and would submit for release shortly after.
As always, the best of luck to our fellow developers and their projects.
To sign off, here’s the box art design for our release.
We’ve just released our game for this year’s October Challenge.
It began as our entry for Ludum Dare 23 but has been polished up since then.
It is available now for PC and will soon be available for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Trailer Here:
Post Here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2012/?action=preview&uid=12839
Hello everyone!
We’re just announcing that we’re coming back for our third Ludum Game Jam. We are again returning as a team of two. We were really hoping that between the last jam and now we would be able to get some more practice in an open/cross platform language. It is likely that, we will stick with C# and XNA 4.0 again, as university kept us quite busy this semester.
Our Tools:
Programming: (Possibly) C# with XNA 4.0
Art: Paint.Net
Sound: Audacity, possibly wolfram tones.
We hope to continue improving for each competition, so let’s hope #3 can make it a pattern. Either way, we love the feedback we get every time, and are happy we have time to compete again.
As always, best of luck to everyone else for Ludum Dare 25.
We, a team of two, are in for our 4th Ludum Dare Game Jam. This time, we may try and go outside of our comfort zone, and create a game with Unity, instead of XNA which we have used for the previous three competitions. We really want to allow more people to play our games, and letting people play it in their browser will only help. If we really get stuck, we may still use XNA as we still want to complete a project. If we use Unity and make a 3D game, we will probably use Sculptris for creating models.
Best of luck to everyone else in the competition, we can’t wait to see what you all make! 
Tools:
– Game Development: (If 3D) Unity (If 2D) XNA
– Graphics: (if 3D) Sculptris & Blender(If 2D) Paint.net
– Audio: Audacity & Soundation
– Post Mortem/Trailer Recording: Fraps or OBS
Links to previous Entries:
Ludum Dare 23: No Air Out Here
Ludum Dare 24: Evosmash
Ludum Dare 25: Metal Minions
Our Website:
http://elementalzeal.com
We’re done all we can for the day. We made a lot of really great progress on our Jam entry. We decided we would go minimalistic on the goal for our game, but that is a surprise for later.
We are about 75% done audio, 95% done graphics, 80% done programming, 60% done level design. Overall though it will still require polish and touch ups, so we’re still looking at a tight deadline.
Below we have included 2 rough images from the games artwork.
It’s great to see all the work everyone else has accomplished, and good luck to everyone on their projects.
-Elemental Zeal Game Studios
Our Chicken Hero
A meteor
Bridge Crosser is now up!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12839
We had submitted it early (last night), but now have all the builds available, as well as a trailer for the game.
Video Here:
Bridge Crosser – Ludum Dare Trailer
Good luck to those still finishing up their jam entries, and we can’t wait to see what everyone makes.
http://elementalzeal.com
Our entry to Ludum Dare 26, Bridge Crosser, has been turned into a larger project due to popular request.
The game now boasts over 15 levels, with new environments, better optimizations, and new features.
The game trailer can be seen here: Bridge Crosser – Release Trailer
Promotional art for the full release of Bridge Crosser!
The game can be bought from our site here: elementalzeal.com/ourGames.php
Tags: bridge, chicken, crosser, physics, pig, platformer, release, trailer, weather
Unfortunately, we were not able to meet the mini LD 44 deadline. This was due to several factors, the main two being part-time work and windows drivers related casualties.
Though we did not finish Pile O’ Pirates in time to have a working game, we fully intend to complete it. So look out for progress updates and videos in the coming months.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElementalZealGS
Website: http://www.elementalzeal.com
Game Features so far
– Zoomable 2D game
– Selection/Movement of pirates constrained to boats.
– Movement of Ship without screwing up pirates.
– Saveable settings (Such as resolution and Fullscreen)
– Over 300 styles of male only (as of now) pirates
– Random name picking from list of popular male names.
Here are some screenshots of what we have managed to accomplish.
The beginnings of Pile O’ Pirates title screen.
A zoomed in view of a selected unit and his comrades.
Selecting some units in Pile O’ Pirates.
Moving a ship in Pile O’ Pirates.
See you all for the next Ludum Dare.
A small image showing some teaser progress for our entry
Hello everyone! We hope your jamming is going well.
At the end of the first day, we have made some progress towards the game we are hoping to complete.
Here is a video demonstrating physics and other setup we performed earlier today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhVliOAyYWU , footage taken from before the image above.
Anyways, we wish you all the best of luck, and look forward to seeing what you create.
A gif showing some early work on Trench Coat Tunes AI, and a bit of the style of the game.
Wooh to figuring out gifs!
Our Jam entry is still making progress. It will be close, but we think we might just get something good finished in time.
Looking forward to having time to play all the lovely competition entries, and good luck to those still working on other Jam entries.
That was a close one! After last minute problems our game was submitted closer to the deadline than ever before. (3 minutes before submission hour :P)
With our fifth Ludum Dare game down, we would like to present to you:
Trench Coat Tunes
You play as C.T Plaear, a fashionable music connoisseur with a magical cassette tape player.
Trench Coat Tunes protagonist, C.T. Plaear
This competition we tried to focus more on interaction with and exploration of the play environment. This included things like almost all game objects being physically reactive, to needing to find hidden items like keycards and passwords to progress. We also experimented with a combination of 2D and 3D art style, and like how it turned out for the most part.
We ended up with a bit more difficult of a game this time, with players often needing to find the best path through a level if they want a chance to progress past the difficult security guards.
We’ve already received some good feedback, including:
– Player movement is too slow/not as tight as we would have liked.
– Instructing the player on what they need to do could have been done better
– More polish in a few key areas (as we would have liked) could have made a world of difference.
Thank you all for the great responses, and as always we had a great time with this event!
And again, we hope everyone with check out Trench Coat Tunes.
Elves’ Eve Poem Wreath
We have pretty much completed our entry for the Jam, but still
have 8 hours left. If anyone has time, and wants to play
our current build to provide some helpful feedback, we
would be very thankful.
Congratulations to everyone who has already completed a competition entry,
and good luck to everyone else working on their Jam entries!
Just a short post as we are quite tired, but we wanted to show what we’ve
gotten done at this point. Everything is coming along slowly but surely, and
were really happy with what we have so far.
Our progress so far
Good luck to everyone else in the competition and jam, and we can’t wait to see what you all create.
For our 8th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created The Asteroids I Call Home.
“Using your super powered cat spacesuit, bash through those that threaten your home.
Mining ships have invading your peaceful asteroid sanctuary. Defend your home the only way you know how: violently bashing through spaceships.
Fly at highspeeds with the help of your jet pack and the gravitational pull of nearby asteroids.
Stop the minors by breaking their chains, ships and defense droids. ”
The Asteroids I Call Home
You can play our entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839
What went wrong:
– Rigging problems
Since this was the first time our artist was doing 3D work, we had a lot of trouble
at first trying to rig our 3D model, due to automatic weight painting.
– Unity animation problems
As we were unsure of our animation pipeline, we had some difficulties
with getting our animations into unity. Although we worked it all out,
it definitely took up more of our time than we would have liked.
– Lost day for the artist
Our artist still had work on the Monday of the jam, which lost
us a day of polish and touch ups we would have liked.
What went right:
– Picked a game idea and finished planning out the details quickly
After just a short brainstorming session, we had an idea we both liked,
and quickly made a few nice pages of planning, so we could focus later on
creating the game, and not having to stop constantly to work out details.
– Doing 3D
Although rigging was stupid, and we had trouble with animations in unity for a little while,
we are quite happy with our results of making a 3D game in just 72 hours.
– Completed all the planned features
Although it took a ton of work, we were really happy that we managed to get evertyhing
into the game that we wanted, including timed mode
– Our best entry yet
We really feel like this was our best entry yet. It had more polish than many of our
other entries, and definitely felt a lot smoother and controlled better than
most of our prior work.
Our 256x speed timelapse can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F0_s6mz3Bs
64x speed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJrYeUrR9Yg
We are having a blast playing the other entries for Ludum Dare 30, and as always can’t
wait for the next competition. Good luck in the voting everyone.
The Asteroids I Call Home death
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839
For our 9th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created Galactyc Budget Flights. Unlike our previous entries, we knew we didn’t have a full 72 hours to work on GBF as it was our weekend before exams. This ended up just allowing us to create a more focused experience, and we are quite happy with the results.
We created this entry using Unity 3D 4.6 with C# for programming, Paint.Net for graphics, Audacity for sound recording, and Soundation for music creation.
Games Description:
“Hello, and welcome to Galactyc Budget Flights!
To keep you paying as little as possible for one of our value flights, your flight will be void of crew members.
Please ensure yourself a safe trip by overlooking all the ship’s subsystems.
Fear not! The ship’s onboard computer will prompt you every step of the way to ensure you have a safe and relaxing flight.
Thank you for choosing Galactyc Budget Flights. “
We learnt some important things from our entry this year:
Galactyc Budget Flights
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12839
We really have enjoyed playing peoples games, and will likely have a favourites post soon. Keep up the great work everyone.
Galactyc Budget Flights Radar