Ludum Dare always looks like a lot of fun from the outside, time to find out if it’s as much fun (or more?) when you actually take part. My friend Gijs and I will be taking part in the Jam. I will be doing most of the coding, he’ll bring his considerable artistic skills to the table.

Don’t expect a masterpiece or anything, we just want to finish something. Playability and fun are priorities.

One thing I’m not 100% sure about: is it okay for the Jam to use Creative Commons sounds and music? Or is that not in the spirit of the event? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Tools

• HTML/Javascript, with a little quickie homebrew framework I whipped up today.
• Probably Photoshop Elements for the graphics, with a dash of Gimp (mostly for the programmer art :-).
• Audacity for sounds, and maybe something like Bfxr.
• Notepad++, Firefox, Firebug.

Have fun everyone!

Okay, maybe I’m not as dedicated as Notch, who seems to have stayed up to start as soon as possible, but 5:30 is a pretty early morning for me.

So, the theme is “Alone”. We were thinking about making a 2D puzzle game as it seems to be a fairly achievable thing for first-timers. How to tie that with the theme? Well… the guy in Soko Ban is alone, isn’t he? Okay, okay, we’ll try to be a little more original than that. And anyway, maybe the best way to emphasize aloneness is to include other people that you cannot or don’t want to interact with. Hmm…

If you’re stuck, why not try a Google Image search for “Alone”? That’s how I found this adorable fella…

Things aren’t going as fast as I’d hoped, but we’re progressing anyway. Feast your eyes on this lovely programmer art! Hopefully in the next update, things will be a little prettier.

Anyway, we settled on an idea. It’s a puzzle game with 2 people (blobs/things/whatever 😉 stuck in different dimensions. They are both Alone but can influence each other by ‘flipping’ platforms over to the other dimension. It’s not fully formed yet though, so lots of work left. The plan is to have an actually playable version this afternoon, then start polishing and designing levels.

It’s a lot of fun to do though!

Well, this Ludum Dare shit got pretty real today. Yo. As I’m sure many of you have experienced, real life has a way of interfering with crazy gamedev weekend. I had to scoot off for a few hours, but still managed to get quite a bit done nonetheless. Gijs drew some awesome stuff as you can see. That’s why you should leave art to the professionals, kids.

We hit a snag when it seemed our game wasn’t much of a game at all, but we’ve had a good long brainstorm and decided how to (hopefully) make the game challenging and fun while still retaining our original concept.

You can try out the rough, un-fun version here. More to come tomorrow!

Well, our progress doesn’t go Boink just yet, we’ll tackle sound tomorrow. But we have made great strides towards an actual playable, even fun, game. Try it yourself!

Also for tomorrow is:

• Walk cycle, so our characters don’t float like master yogi anymore.
• A heartwarming, tearjerking (okay, cheesy) story. We’ve got a draft ready.
• General polish
• Moar particlez!

If you’re doing LD48: you’re a braver human than I am, and I wish you luck in the last few hours. For fellow LD72’ers: good luck tomorrow!

Wow, that was three days of hard work, but the results are pretty awesome, even if we do say so ourselves. I think Gijs’ artwork is top-notch, and I feel that we’ve managed to deliver a polished and fun game. Give it a try, please rate it and let us know what you think!

We were very happy to win the 2nd prize in the Jam with our game Together Alone. Although this was our first LD, Gijs and I have worked on creative projects together for a long time, including games, and it’s gratifying to see that people appreciate our imaginings.

As we’re planning to do more games together, we’ve decided on a name for our two-man team and created a website: Qwok Games. Qwok was a minor character in our old comics (see the site if you’re interested), and we both liked him so much we’ve adopted him as our mascot.

Together with a few other LD22 participants (including Midas and Follow) we were asked by JayIsGames.com if they could host us. We were happy to say yes, and worked hard to provide an even more polished version. It is now up on the site, along with a very positive review. Woohoo!

Tags: jam jig

About a year ago (LD22) Gijs and I decided to enter the Jam. We coded (me) and drew (him) furiously for a few days and built Together Alone, a story-based puzzler where you could switch between controlling two characters to solve tile-breaking puzzles. We came in 2nd in the Jam, and we decided to start building a sequel.

That sequel became Together Alone: Love in Limbo. A new and improved story, gorgeous hand-drawn graphics, many new game elements and even a level editor. We just released our second beta version and are looking for feedback. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Play the beta (Flash)

Big thanks to the Ludum Dare organisers; we thought about building a game for a long time, but this kind of competition is just the kick in the butt we needed to actually get going. We’re already busy designing our the next game, even. But first we need to finish this one. Your comments are appreciated!