I have decided to participate in the October challenge.

I will be starting a completely new game called Jarth.

This game will be somewhat spooky type.  You know, with ghost and suchnot. (Haha “suchnot”; it’s a funny word.)

The game will probably be twenty-five cents, maybe fifty.

Wish me luck!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2012 at 8:03 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

i have the sprites, the idea and the title for this challenge.

you can see the under-construction here.

good luck!

Tags: challenge, exertion, october, sadness, unity

Well, have a terrific idea for a game. Wish I had thought of it earlier or at least played the game that inspired me earlier. The story and game mechanics for my game is much inspired by both the Walking dead game and Heavy Rain. I don’t exactly know what the plot is but if im going to try and make a game like that I should at least make the bulk of the engine over the weekend. I’m not sure if it would be possible to build a game like this in a month but i best not waist time and get started. I’ll post screenshots, etc, of my progress on Sunday.  That’s all for now. Bye.

It’s been a long time since I have done game development (back in my day cell-phones ran this thing called BREW and J2ME, and you’d be happy if you could raster a 128×240 screen in 4bits of gray scale!  We also had FF00FF up hill both ways in the snow!).

This is a new project starting from scratch, based on ideas that I’ve been kicking around for almost a decade in a very minimalist form.

Project: Alpha^2D

A 2D top down multi-player game, where players control space ships in real-time (have you played subspace?) in a little persistent world.  Gathering resources, selling/buying from stations, attacking other players.  Will most likely be in Java on lwjgl, but since Torque3D has gone MIT that may be useful instead.  (God help my rusty C++ skills).

I am going to use my new game engine to make this game. The engine is only 2D compatible now, but after this compo, I hope to add 3D features as well. Check http://comp.tgamedev.net for more info. #tgamedev #ldcompo #letsdothis

The thought of trying to monetize, even to a tiny degree seems like an awesome goal. I’ve spent the time since the August LD mostly working on my art skills, so I’ve improved enough with pixel art that my games might not make you vomit on sight anymore.

However, since I’ve been working almost exclusively on improving in the art department, I really don’t have any ongoing projects. I’ve been wanting to give Unity a shot, since I’m only fluent in C#, and I don’t really like a few things in XNA. Since I’m thinking of trying totally new tools, and I don’t have anything in the works, it’s unlikely that I’ll even have a prototype for anything within a month. I’m definitely going to start moving down that path, and we’ll see what happens, October or not.

This is my first October challenge, and the first time I will of monetized a game O.O. I don’t know what I’m making yet, or where I’m gonna’ sell it but I’ll have to think about that pretty soon!

Wish me luck!

So I’m gonna do october challenge but i may have a problem, i’m only 17 so it’s going to be kinda difficult to market my product. I could really use some advise. Anyways here is a screenshot   its a tower defense game

Tags: java, TowerDefence

Hi LD’ers,

Well I’m in I need to finish and polish my in Beta Game…

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csd_HDToWr0

It’s a Tower Defence style game developed in Unity, currently has 100 levels and a level editor but still needs some more work polishing and finishing.

It has also been put forward for Steams Greenlight http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93351427

And has a facebook page here http://www.facebook.com/GnomesInBlack

Good Luck to all the October Challengers!

So I may have jumped the gun a little for the October challenge as I posted my game Vox to Desura a couple of weeks ago and it is already selling and making money…

http://www.desura.com/games/vox

It is hard for me to believe that I started working on Vox as an entry into a Ludum Dare competition only a few months ago and it seems to have come along so far since then, I am really glad that I got involved in Ludum Dare and I dont think I would have ever made a complete game, that is selling for actual money, without getting involved in LD.

I will continue to use the October challenge time to further gain more insight and knowledge into the business side of making games and use it to learn about different ways to market and monetise a game… and use the challenge as an opportunity to do that side of development, since I am a programmer and my knowledge of such business is limited.

I am also constantly improving and adding new stuff to Vox, (since it is still in pre-alpha stage) so this will take up lots of time too.

I can offer advice for other people wanting to use the Desura publishing route to publish and sell your game as the process was fairly easy for me and it seems the Desura guys really want to create a system where it is easy to sell your indie game.

Good luck guys!

Tags: alwaysgeeky, cubes, gamedev, indie, minecraft, progress, vlog, Vox, voxel engine, voxels, youtube

After a small multi-month ludum dare break of almost a year, its time to dust off some old game code, review the years progress on code libraries and  take on some ambition… So, armed with my current, modular subkernel based architecture or yester-year, a prometheus build from yester-month, some thought from yester-week and some ideas from yester-day it looks like I’m all set to take on another Ludum dare challenge. Or maybe, we’ll. Depending on how the computing freshmen turn out. We shall see…

In the meantime – the game.

What it is: Thats a tough one. MMORTS with a few RPG qualities coupled with SVG style graphics and one objective: race to the finish. While wiping out the odd impudent soul trampling on your empires turf along the way.

Whats the objective: Simple. Own a major portion of the galaxy more than all the other players’ combined. Or gain superiority through some means… And hold that superiority for 72 hours…

Whats it going to look/play like: Played neptunes pride much? Then the UI should be somewhat familiar. Similar game mechanics in terms of what your empire is defined by. Just with the thrown in tech tree, few unit types, strategic location, multiple star system/nebula type things and lots and lots of relaxed gameplay against lots and lots of enemies… Sins of a solar empire much?

Whats it going to cost me: I dont know what its’ going to cost you. A lot of hours for starters. And a donation should you feel so inclined.

Its HTML5/flash/unity/xyz-web-tech based right? NOPE. Yep, thats a nope. And heres nope: windows. Its looking like a Mac/Linux submission. I’ve had issues with windows messing me around with dlls, violations and the like in the past. I’ve also had people put at the mercy of windows’ userbases’ disinclinement towards indie games cause some trouble… Not to mention the abomination that microsoft deludes will be the future. So sorry guys, open source, kremlin-source, virtualbox or bust here… Though I might be tempted to roll he win32 hatred should some people with donations be so inclined

It’ll be ready soon right? Well… Its currently 5,500 lines of framework and game backend. Which isnt bad for 40minutes worth of typing and recylcing. Truth is, this one is 90% new and original. Yes, its not complex by design but it  is new. And that means its going to need time. Beta builds? You bet. The gameplay is meant to be a couple weeks long and I’d like the dust to clear by mid november time so thats that. In-game updates and expansions galore

Open source, closed source… Can I roll my own? Well yes, you can. Its centralized around one binary so if you want a game with your friends you’ll just need to hit server mode and remember that IP . Thanks to the donations market model – open source is no biggie.

Screenies? Well, its all backend stuff I’m working on right now. Programmer art soon. Promise

Whats it called then? For now, project ellipsis was my most creative thought about 10 minutes ago…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2012 at 2:59 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So apparently little sisters are useful for something after all. What started as her idea for a game: cooking, turned into an interesting concept that is still a concept. I mind as well write it down though.

You play as a “Cooker Girl”, equipped with a frying pan for self defense as you platform through the various environments in search of the ingredients you need to bake a cake: Flour, Milk, and Eggs. The levels are not built to be all that linear as you should spawn someone in the middle of a level, allowing for both horizontal and vertical platforming gameplay that encourages exploration. You will also collect some sort of mini score item similar in purpose to the coins in Mario. Along the way you will battle some sort of creature, I say to myself. What can I add that is dark and evil but still kiddie and lighthearted and still fits in with the theme to a degree? Cartoony slendermen? That’s the plan… for now. xD

This should turn out to be pretty interesting, I’ll make a post once I get something decent and playable released!

So for last year’s October Challenge I released my game Haunted Hallway on to the app store, and since then it’s made about $2,250. This year I want to try something a little bit different, so by the end of the month I’m going to try and launch a Kickstarter for the game I’m currently working on, Another Castle.

Another Castle combines classic platforming gameplay with the randomness of a rouguelike. You play as Andy, a kid who’s looking for a random item, whether it be a kick ass magical sword, a wizard hat, or royalty. To find the item you must run, jump, and fight your way through a randomly generated castle. When you beat the game, you sadly won’t get the item, as it’s always in another castle. Instead, the item is now unlocked and can be found in future playthroughs of the game.

I currently have the first barebones prototype up at AnotherCastleTheGame.com. My goal is to update that prototype to an acceptably awesome level throughout the month, and to create everything I need for the Kickstarter campaign.

For the October Challenge, I’m going to try to get my Ludum Dare 23 Entry polished up for submission to one or more stores. I’ve been working on it on and off over the last few months but haven’t been motivated to really finish it. The game is Ethereal Isles, where you drop monsters onto a floating island to fight other monsters. Combat on a single island is meant to be fairly simple and short, under two minutes. Typically you’ll add some abilities to your monsters and drop them at specific points on the island, perhaps waiting a few seconds for enemies to clump up or for some poor soul to be left behind so you can drop a monster on top of them.

Ethereal Isles

I have added several more monsters and abilities, and polished up the GUI with better buttons, tooltips, health bars, etc. I also feel that the game in its current state has just enough stuff to be interesting but not confusing. I’m afraid if I add any more stuff there will be a lot of moments where there is so much chaos and mayhem on the screen that it will be hard to understand what’s going on.

I’m going to try and put out a test version in the next week after I’ve put in an actual menu and proper victory conditions. It looks like getting this onto Kongregate will be the easiest place to post this game, since they support Unity. The game seems like a good fit for play on tablets, but at the moment I have neither Apple nor Android tablets, so I’ll have to try that another time. Alas!

Meet Captain Galaxy … Coming soon … Ludum Time !

( No , seriously , you can follow the progress on the IRC or on the posts that will follow this one )

( I’ll be making a timelapse if possible ! )

PS. my game will cost 1$ november 1st , only for you guys 😀

Although I’ll probably take the adverts in game option, recently been in touch with an awesome guy about use some of their music for a game I’ve just started making recently and free-to-play means I can use the music, giving credits to him, pay for means I should give him some monies, although I’ll probably do that anyway as it is awesome music.

I’ll stick to something simple and (hopefully) playable as opposed to over-complicating things, try to add sheen to it in order to have a small yet addictive game (It’ll be a runner, yup).

I’ll probably try to post updates on my blog over at: http://www.refreshcreations.co.uk/games/

Best of luck to everyone who’s entering, now onwards with pro style!

I was just thinking about polishing up one or more of the prototypes I have laying around into a full-featured, marketable game and putting it up on Google Play.

Accepting this challenge is a little extra motivation to do so this month, and maybe even look into finding a way of selling a PC version of the game.

I’m not sure exactly what game I’m going to do this with yet, though. I’m looking at my previous LD entries as well as some other unpursued prototypes and doing some new-game-brainstorming on the side.

Since I already have an LLC and bank account set up and all the paperwork and waiting that goes with that taken care of, the “selling” aspect of this challenge is at least mostly, if not completely done, and all that remains is finishing a game and advertising it somehow. Will probably also want to beta test, too – although selling an alpha for a larger project might be an option, if I can find something that I can honestly say I’d like to work on long-term, and enough people express interest in playing/buying my unfinished game. Might be good to have a smaller game ready to finish and put to market anyway, just in case.

There’s one idea in particular which I think might have a lot of the right things going for it in terms of marketability and I think would be really cool to work on. The question remains is how much/good of an alpha would I be able to make in less than a month on my ownsome.

So, I’m giving myself another day or two to really work through a few ideas on what to do. This month-long timeframe is nice hopefully I make good use of it.

Also, I wish everyone participating in this the best of luck, and hope everyone involved does make a good, honest buck (hopefully more!) off something they’ve made!

-Tom

Hi guys, just wondering if there’s anyone with some spare time who could make me a few small images of a stickman. All I’m after is images that could be put to form an animation so it looks like the guy is walking. Size specifications would be around 150 pixels high, and this would be enough detail. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help

Hey, I’m joining the October Challange with my current game “Hover Castle”.

I’m LIVESTREAMING on weekends as much as I can.
Click here to get to the livestream on Twitch.tv

A screenshot.

Ludum Dare is awesome and I’ve been wanting to have a go for a while now and the October challenge is great motivation to get a project I was going to start next year happening now!

I’ve got the market side of things covered when I released my free alpha on the apple app store but I still haven’t earned a cent from it.

And I’m going to take a break from polishing that game and take the challenge.

For those interested you can checkout my released game www.tesseractgame.com and my skeleton website www.zombietales.net project for the Ludum Dare challenge.

Wish me luck!

We spent a few evenings making a “game” based on the XKCD 1110 comic. Play it here: http://xkcd.kajakklubben.org/

It is time for me to release a new game! This game will be for iOS, since I already have an account setup for it. The hard part is, which game will I release. I have several options:

– A puzzle game for the iPhone I have been working on, but something is not right with it. The UX is not good enough. Also I don’t know if I can fix a broken game within a month.

– A kid’s math game for my daughter and son. I want the game which my daughter can play with her mom or me. The game must be a tool to learn numbers, figures and colours. The math game for my son will teach divisional. He is a bit older and can play without our help.

– An arcade like game. It is a mix of Missile Command and an endless runner.

I am going to show the arcade game during a developers meet up / lunch in Utrecht next Wednesday at the Dutch Game Garden to get feedback about the game play. I started working on this arcade game after I finished my mini LD entry and it is all Javascript. I really want to make an arcade game for the iPad, but without the virtual game pad and buttons used for game play. I think this is a good start, but I just want to know what other developers think about it.

After Wednesday I will know which game I will be working.

Good luck to everyone who accepted the OC!

Hey guys, here is the logo

and a screenshot from the game

This is the wizard character.

Running in an iPhone 4S with iOS5.1.1 at 60FPS, less than 10k polys for each part of the whole scene, it also contains  4 particle systems for the torchs, a HUD control to move the char and 2700 frames of animations for the model.

The initial scene has a camera trajectory that follows a helper like a trail and end up then with the logo and menu buttons to start the game.

All I can say is that I’m working too hard to make this game really good.

Tags: 3D, egypt, Egyptian, hack & slash, iphone, shiva

First bit of art!

After 2 days of laid back programming, I decided to pretty it up a bit to allow for a screenshot. I’m used to pixel art, but I’ve gone for a more cartoony, wobbly-edge… thing. It’s going to be a puzzle/adventure game with items and whatnot, but right now there’s none of that. At the moment, I can generate a room, move the player about (with hit detection), push and pull boxes, and trigger doors with boxes by moving them onto a switch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2012 at 11:04 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Even though I have serious doubts about being able to make something worth buying in a month, I’m going for it.  I’m going to take my game from LD #24, End Humanity!, and make it into a “full game”.  Since I don’t have to stick with the theme of evolution, I’ll probably change things around.  I’m thinking something involving space ships.  That might result in easier art for me, which is great.  I’m not an artist, and currently, I rather work alone on this.  There’s so much I’ll need to do during October.  Maybe I should start a dev blog, for that seems to be the thing to do.  But enough of my rambling, onward towards glory!

Tags: end humanity, october challenge

After 3 very successful LDs, I’m finally going to try and get my games out there in the market.

I’m writing a website from scratch in HTML, setting up PayPal stuff, I’ve bought the domain name, and all I really need now is hosting.

My plans are to release two games for free (one is my LD#24 game!) and one for $5. I’d say these all need a bit of polishing, but I can always release first and update later.

Anyone have some good recommendations for hosting? Sadly, I’m not so experienced with the whole website-development thing so I don’t really know much.

Thanks to everyone here for being part of the community and inspiring me to make games!

My big Flash game – When Asteroids Attack – just began sponsorship hunting late this month (still September!) and so my dollar should come from that *fingers tightly crossed since I’m still pretty new to game sponsorship!*

However, the game I’ll be working on in October is finishing up an old Ludum Dare entry. It was for LD18 – Enemies as Weapons – and was called The Adventures of Rubberman! The concept: defeat evil bullies with Rubberman’s bouncy superhero outfit by bouncing their insults right back at them!

I am working on finishing the game up, and the concept has changed quite a bit since then. Back then, Rubberman was a random person who fought the evils of bullying; the new game is entirely focused on the concept of bullying in schools. It features Rubberkid (a kid just like you; you even get to customize the male or female superhero with your own story) as he helps save other children from bullies, and demonstrates multiple types of bullying (from the chess-loving artistic nerd to the sports star to the teachers themselves!), as well as showing why bullying is bad (each child you help will give you a story on what became of them after helping them, and what would have happened if you hadn’t).

As far as earning my dollar goes for The Adventures of Rubberkid, my concept is to reach out to anti-bullying groups and people for sponsorship. I would like to see if they would be interested in paying a bit to get listed, with several tiers of sponsorship (name in credits; logo in credits; logo in main menu; splash screen pre-game). It’s an experiment for sure, but even if it does only make $1, it’s a concept that’s dear to me and so I really want to make the game

Hey Ludum Dare community! I will be competing in October Challenge 2012! This will be my third game I have ever made, and my first one in java, so I may have trouble. I don’t have any ideas yet, so I am still in the brainstorming stage, but i am hoping that I will have an idea soon and be able to get started. If you have any ideas please post them in the comments below.

I will be putting my game up for sale on http://indievania.com/ for $0.25. I think that 25 cents is a good point for a game that you probably will put down after about 10 minutes. But if I think it will be a game that will get played more than that, I may make it around $1.

So that is about it…

Adios

After 10hrs of production time this is the first screen grab of some Zombie Testing – zombietales.net

Things are tracking well. I’m using stock models to save time and if I can get all the core game mechanics happening in the next week I’ll be stoked!!!

For people who use Tile Studio, there is a new version with some new features!

You can download it here: http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/

Tags: tilestudio

So I said that I’d have something to show for my game today but it seems that I was at my friends all weekend playing Borderlands 2. We also had “beat Mom” races in The Binding of Isaac, and while we where playing we asked the question what if this game where multi-player. With that, the previous Idea I had for the game (Walking dead/Heavy Rain Inspired) completely turned into Multi-player Binding of Isaac. I know I wont be able to complete an online version, but on the same screen might be possible. So tomorrow I promise I’ll  have something to show.

Till then.

So here’s what I have, a small iOS game =)

I call it Puwang

Tags: C++, opengl, progress, puwang, screenshot

So, here’s Jewel Fight.  It will be a two-player puzzle/strategy kinda thing.  Here’s what it looks like!

The game will be turn based.  Each turn, you will be able to match adjacent jewels for points, or send one of your jewels flying at your opponents jewels to destroy some of theirs.  Essentially, you will have to balance getting points with preventing your opponent from getting good matches.  Hopefully it ends up being fun!  I will probably add a 1 player vs. Computer mode, in addition to the two player mode.

I am going mobile for this one.  I plan on making a web-based desktop/mobile version that’s free to play against the computer, as a sort of demo.  The full two-player version will be sold as an Android app…possibly Windows Phone, too, if I can figure out how to port it.  I plan on pricing it at $0.99, so one copy will get my $1!

I’m in!…

…and have no idea where to start.  Wish me luck!

Here’s the first idea I had.  I don’t think it’s great or necessarily has potential, and it might change, but here’s my design so far.  tldr; link to playable prototype http://www.andrewekeren.com/swf/trashcompactorpanic.swf

Trash Compactor Panic

Mechanics:
1. The player can move left and right, as well as do a short jump.
2. Garbage falls from the ceiling and settles where it lands.
3. The player can jump on the garbage at any time.
4. Garbage can crush the player, causing a game over.
5. The bottom of the game space is a “grinder,” which slowly destroys garbage sitting on top of it.
6. Pistons occasionally appear from the sides of the screen, and crush an entire row or column of garbage.
7. Player can be crushed by pistons.
8. Player can stand on top of the row piston.
9. Difficulty increases over time, which increase the speed of the grinder, the drop rate of garbage, and the chance that a difficult drop pattern is chosen (more on this later.)
10. “Solid garbage” act as platforms. Solid garbage does not drop, is not destroyed by pistons, and garbage can stack on top of it. Technically, solid garbage will drop just at a slower rate than regular garbage, but it will scroll at the same speed as the background to give the look of it not moving at all.

Progression:
Setup: Difficulty is set to the easiest mode, and the player is placed on top of a flat, two-layer deep pile of garbage positioned on top of the grinder.
A. One drop pattern is chosen at random.
B. The level spits out a row of the pattern at a time.
C. At the end of the pattern, a “reset” is called, which will crush the garbage below the player and spit out a row of garbage for the purpose of giving the player a flat playfield. A reset looks at the current state (garbage piles) and decides which blocks to drop based on what will give a flat playfield.
D. Difficulty is increased, and a new pattern in chosen.
E. At any point the player can be crushed by a piston, grinder, or garbage which immediately leads to game over.

I’d like to think of this as an action puzzle game. I want to work on these mechanics and make them fun, but if they show some potential I think that power-ups could add greatly to the game. Drill hats and wall-jump boots are two ideas. Honestly after prototyping the patterns in Excel I don’t have much hope for this design. At the same time game design is new to me so I don’t know what a potentially good design looks like.

Post Mortem

Last LD marked my first attempt at making a game in under 48 hours, and I ended up being quite happy with the result. Evo Dash got a lot of very positive reviews, and ended up at #19 in Fun and #50 in Overall. So one might wonder what I have left to learn from this modest success? Turns out: a lot! Here’s a short list of the things I did well, and the things I failed, or could have done better.

Things I did well

• I am very happy with how the gameplay turned out. When I started out, I had a very vague idea about a cancer simulation in the human body, and I just started coding. The game completely evolved from that initial point to something extremely different, changing from a game about cancer  (the origins can still be found in many class names) to a game about evolving rules and survival. I just freestyled my way through it and it really worked out great: I followed my instincts and didn’t lose any time writing down nice ideas or concepts.
• I like the graphics. Not because they’re extremely beautiful, but because they do the job, and I’m very proud of that, because I really really SUCK at doing graphics. I quickly decided that my only option was to go with abstract shapes, and managed to get some cuteness out of them in the process (eyes!)
• I loved my choice of platform: HTML5/JS is a dream for something like this. HTML5 has extremely fast (instant) code-test cycles (no compilation), good API’s to build on (canvas), immediate playability and accessibility and so much more. No setup costs either; all I used was Chrome and Sublime Text, the best text editor on the planet.
•  I really like the overall feel and presentation of the game. I spent quite some time tuning the graphics and adding small details (shake effects, flashes, random colors, game tips, a nice menu, etc), and it really paid off in presentation. First impression is important and I think mine was solid.

Things I did not so well

• I really skimped on one really important part of the game: the music and sound effects. I truly believe my game would have ended considerably higher with an adrenaline-filled, pumped soundtrack underneath it to support the hectic gameplay and graphics. Sound effects also add greatly to the feel of the game, and I should not have neglected them. But I still do not really know how to go about adding them. I can’t really compose myself, and have no idea how to make sound effects, so I’d have to scavenge from the internet. Where to start? I have no idea.
• I spent quite some time optimizing the game to run on all browsers and on slower machines, time I could have spent better on other areas. But that’s the downside of the current state of HTML5: even though some browsers (chrome, IE9) are extremely fast, some others (Firefox) are slow, and you really need to pay attention to how you implement certain things to get it to run quick enough.

Still, I am very happy with the result (and ratings), and decided to go forth and build a mobile version of the game, so this gets us straight to…

October challenge!

Because there is no way this game was going to run in the browser on mobile devices, I had to port it to a different platform. So I spent the last month porting the game to Unity, adapting it for touchscreen and adding LOTS and LOTS of new stuff, including making the game kind-of-3D. I also got an artist in on the project to give the graphics a proper overhaul. After slightly over one month, this is what the game now looks like:

The game is coming along very nicely, and we hope to wrap up in a couple of weeks. We really improved the original game in every possible way, greatly pimped the graphics and added tons and tons of different evolutions that can happen. We’re now at the point that it becomes time to start reaching out to press, and hopefully get some buzz going for this game. I really believe we have something special here, something unique plays perfectly on mobile as a quick go-to game, comparable to Canabalt or Doodle Jump.

One sore point at this moment is the lack of sound and music. We’re not going to make the mistake again of releasing a game with bad or missing sound effects, so we took a two-pronged approach to this problem. Firstly, from the start, we used a temporary free track from Danny B’s website that represents the atmosphere of the game well to test it with. This allowed me to incorporate the music in the game early-on, which also resulted in the entire game being synched to the beat to give it a better flow. We are now getting in contact with sound effect artists and composers to find a suitable match for the final soundtrack of the game.

Conclusion

Things are looking great for Evo Dash, and if everything goes right, we should have a release on our hands before the end of October, which will hopefully make a little more than 1 dollar. This all resulted from my first Ludum Dare participation, so you can be damn sure I will be back for more of this later. I realized that competitions like these are excellent for trying crazy game ideas without getting lost in details, because they force you to focus on the core with the strict time constraint.

I will keep you guys up to date on the progress as we get closer to a release!

Post Mortem

The game TreeVolve was a big success for us, the LD#24 Jam went so good and we are so happy. Thank you so much everyone! #13 Graphic, Daniel was so happy and now is 100 times more motivated about making more levels and better graphic.
The game at release had some problems, it was short, no end game, too easy, too repetitive, some game breaking bugs, but yeah, we made #79 Overall and the next one will be a huge improvement.

Feedbacks

We get a lot of feedback about treevolve, we have read every word you told us and I’m developing hard for make it better and better. The big feedback was “port it to smartphone!”.
As you know I developed the game in C++ with the help of Allegro for the rendering part and I have only an Android smartphone. Porting the game on android is a big work, I have to write everything again in Java, change the main, change the rendering functions, change how sounds is handled and a lot more but…

October Challenge 2012

… we will not give up, in the last4 days I have worked on making this port and the porting 1:1 from Windows to Android is working perfectly on every type of screen and resolution.

Test with a big screen (10”), but it’s working on very small screen too 

As you can see from the photo everything is working great, sound, GUI, touch and so on… but this is only a 1:1 port, we are working for give you a lot lot more fun! Daniel have designed from scratch the GUI from making a lot more confortable for touch screen and not in the center of the screen like it is now.

The big problem: Repetitive

Yes, this is a big problem, we have to find a solution for make the game fun during the time and not only the first 5 minutes.
We have designed something new for give you more fun: (Some secret sketch’s, but psss, don’t tell it to Daniel I showed you)

• (1) Map select.
  Yes! There will be more levels and with a fun story line to follow. What is all this water? Maybe you can stop the water fro unblock new levels
  To design there will be 5 new maps with different goals and scenery.
• (2)Hey, why I have to collect all these branches?
• (3)A helper is swimming? So much water .

TL;DR: New scene, new goals, story, new levels, new monsters, scores!, share with friends…
Oh, I forgot to tell you about bosses! Nah, another day

There is a lot more to tell you (What about the evolving tree? What about helpers? Why I have to do all these stuff?) but I will tell you more another day =)

Testing

When the alpha is ready we will need some android beta testers for help us test it on different smartphones. Follow me on twitter @davidemo89 for contact me when the alpha is ready for help us a little =) Everyone helping us will have a no banner copy of the game for free.
PS: I will tell you when the alpha is ready and when we need some testers.

So, you made it till here, sorry for all the grammar errors, if you found some contact me, I’m happy and trying to improve my English skills.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 9:14 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So after the screenshots here’s a gameplay video. I’m sorry but I don’t have any good camera so this was taken offscreen using a cellphone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIiKBVTiEhM&feature=g-upl

Tags: puwang

Its 1am and i just wrapped up for the night. Ive been trying to lockdown my in game gui and i thought I’d share this test game play video I made!

Enjoy

www.zombietales.net

OK, I’m in. I’ve been kicking a few ideas around with a mate (he draws, I programme) but we’ve never finished anything so this seems like a good excuse to push one of those ideas to completion. We’re going with our simplest idea: “Escape from Plan 9”. It’s an Ed Wood inspired endless runner which we’re going to build for the web, either as a free to play but we accept donations or via some sort of payment method on the Chrome Web Store.

Maybe if we get this finished it’ll give us the incentive we need to get one of the more complex ideas finished!

Some of you guys know my record of finishing things.  Right now I’m working on a Sonic the Hedgehog style platformer.  Now it might take 6 – 12 months to get this thing done, so it might not be until October Challenge 2013 that I get anything to sell for a buck.  I have a good chance of at least getting first playable by the end of this October, and I might could even possibly squeeze an alpha in by then, so I have a challenge for you Ludum-darians — I’m going to bet you $1 that I can get up to alpha version of my game by the end of October.  If I manage this, you send me $1 via paypal, and if I don’t I send YOU $1 via paypal.   So basically I get an incentive to get off my butt and get a game done sooner than I might normally.   I get a finished playable/sellable game.  I get your respect (well maybe — I just mean if I finish something you guys might have a little more respect for me).  If I win I get a buck and win the October challenge.  YOU get someone participating in LD’s October Challenge, you get a great game that’s actually finished, and if I don’t get to alpha stage, YOU get a whole dollar (US, and paypal only).  So no matter what happens it’s a win/win!  And to sweeten the pot everyone who bets gets a copy of the finished game, no matter if you win or I win.  (What it will mean is if I win you get a great game for a buck, if you win you will get a great game for free and you will get a buck

So what do you say?

P.S.

Some people suggested they might bet a dollar if I came up with a list of items to complete for this alpha to be completed.

Well let’s see —

full game map created with layout graphics (meaning triangles and boxes and stuff to layout the places Flash can run)

Collision including walking up and down slopes and using momentum to go around loops.

Enemies

Enemy attacks

Powerups

Logical map flipping

Boss round/level

bonus levels

I think that about does it, no sound effects or music, and only the basic of graphics — just enough to get the point across.

pps.  If you want to take the “bet” please leave a comment below to make it “official”

ppps. To clarify — Whether or not I win or lose you still get a copy of the full version of the game, and any updates from alpha to release!

I missed the last LD due to being stuck in a field in Wales, but I’m definitely up for the challenge.

I attempted the first October Challenge back in 2010 and failed miserably, mainly due to not having a well enough defined idea which left me with no game to sell. This time around, I’ve already got a game ready to go, so I get to focus on the scary business stuff and deal with my terrible fear of actually executing anything…

So here’s what I’ll be polishing up for release – Lagertron : 1664. The basic concept could best be described as “Robotron goes to the pub”

The initial plan is to get the Android version out, with PC/Mac/Linux releases following if I have the time.

Anything you want to know stands here.

I’m gonna make a game from scratch, and it’s gonna be simplistic.
Perhaps Android.

Also check out my Twitter! 😀

– Folis

Hello Ludum Dare, I’m somewhat active in the IRC, but not so much in the competitions or on the site. For those of you who don’t know who I am, I’m Bret Hudson, an indie game developer from Minnesota. I run indie(Function);, an indie game development media and education group. indie(Function); primarily consists of a radio show, and a currently dead magazine.

indie(Function); is low on members right now, consisting of myself, the co-founder Ian “Halfrican” Jones, and Mike LeRoy. We’d like to revive indie(Magazine);, but in order to do so, we need a designer and possibly a few more writers since Mike and I have a hard time putting together 20-30 pages of content by ourselves. However, with the proper team, I’m sure indie(Magazine); can come back to it’s old self and possibly beat the records we currently have placed (most viewed magazine has 1,100 views as of typing this up).

Here’s a list of different positions that are available:

• Magazine designer
• Magazine writer(s)
• Social Media Helper (Post updates to our Facebook, Twitter, forum topics, RSS feed, etc)
• “Gatherer” (Finds topics to talk about, thinks up interesting topics, etc)
• Recruiter (Finds both new members for the team, as well as contacts people for interviews)

None of the above positions are pay-jobs, we currently have no income. The team in the past has always been friendly, and I can imagine it will continue to be with any new members we receive. The positions are great for experience and offer opportunities to talk to some bigger developers (past interviews have included Edmund McMillen, Alec Holowka, Chevy Ray Johnston).

If you want to preview the magazine to know what a common issue consists of, click the following link to be brought to a list of issues: http://www.indieFunction.com/magazine

Thank you for your time, and I hope to have some of you join us in bringing the indie gaming community indie(Radio); and indie(Magazine);.
-Bret Hudson ~ indie(Function); CEO/Editor in Chief

So I’m in guys!

Mostly starting from scratch only armed with my cocos2d-x experience and a rough idea. You can follow (or not) the progress on my kind of a blog.

Oh I forget to mention that beside having 0 lines of code my game already has a name:

PowerUp!

Ready for some PowerUp gathering madness?

So, I’m new here.  My name is Alex, and I’ve been trying to make games for quite some time with no real luck or success.  I currently don’t have any particular game projects I’m working on, unless interactive art and music count as games.

I use MMF Pro and Game Maker primarily.  I don’t really know any code, so the visual creation option really suits me.  I do have Unity, but I’ve not really tried to make anything with it.

I’m posting here because I wanted to share something.  I’m offering my music for use in amateur games.  I wont be requiring any payment or anything really, I just want to build my portfolio.  So, if you have a cool project you’re working on and you need help creating sound effects or a score, hit me up.  I’d be happy and more than willing to help you on your project.

You can see a short demo of some of my pieces at my website.  www.crashbangzebra.com.   My email address is available there so you can contact me.

I look forward to working with you.  Thanks.
-Alex Ragsdale

I’ve been wanting to do this for a bit, but haven’t had a chance.

Here’s the soundtrack for my Ludum Dare 24 entry, hope you like/ liked it!

This month I will be participating in the October Challenge.

I plan to port my game Untitled to HTML5 and place in on a web game portal.

While I plan to do a port of the game, I would also like to add and revise the game as needed to work best on html5. I plan to keep both versions, but I don’t think that the game is served very well by being an exe download. The gameplay is simple and fast, a very casual game. By porting it to html5 I hope to find an audience for the game that is currently lacking.

I’m usually the worst at starting a project and not finishing it, so I’m going to try to use the October Challenge to finally get something out the door. That something is a game I’ve been working on and off on called Tumble Tooth.

In Tumble Tooth, you need to direct a tooth out of a sewer. The catch is that you don’t have any control over the tooth itself. Instead, you need to rotate the entire world, challenging you to avoid obstacles and most importantly, keep your sense of direction.

The plan is to release both a web Flash version and an Android version. So far, I’ve been pretty good about making a mobile build as up to date as the web build, sometimes even putting it as the preferred version, but there’s still so much work I’d like to do, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep up. The tasks I’d like to get in before the end of the month include:

• Re-skinned, scaling UI.
• Content. Always need more content for a puzzle game. I can add more later, but I need a decent amount at launch.
• Sound and music. Not quite sure what I’ll do for these, but I’ll figure something out.
• Analytics. Maybe it’s because I work on Facebook games for a living, but the idea of launching a game without analytics seems crazy to me. I’ll probably go with something simple like tracking when a mission is played, failed, and won so I can get a rudimentary idea of where drop off happens and keep an idea of how often people play.
• Another pass at art.

Any extra time will be spent on content and puzzle mechanics.

Tonight, I spent some time just going back through the source code to re familiarize myself with everything. The real important gain was that I finished working on an trigger-event system to toggle visibility and collision on parts of the level. This essentially allows part of the sewers to go “behind” other parts, and really opens up what I can do with level design.

You can follow my progress at mcb.ee and @mscottmcbee, both of which are pretty empty at the moment. mcb.ee will be reposts of updates I make here for now, but I’ll try to keep it up to date after October

Devmania hobby game developer meeting & overnight gamejam contest. Here you can show your current indie game and you can participate on the nights gamejam.

The Devmania (former Dusmania) is held every year since 1998 in Frankfurt/Main & later since 2009 Mainz Germany.

The contest: Develop a game overnight from 14pm – 9am.

http://www.devmania.org/

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 3:43 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

October Challenge: Knight Souls

We’ve been working on our game Knight Souls for some time now and we should be able to release it this week or so. This is going to be our biggest launch ever. Were going to release for iPhone, Android, XBLIG, Windows Phone, PC, Mac and Linux. Previously we have only released to Windows Phone, so it’s going to be exciting to see what happens when we release to these other platforms.

Post Production Checklist

If you haven’t launched a game before, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Making a Trailer

1. Gather Footage (screen capture program is likely needed)
2. Learn the basics of a video editing program (if you don’t know how already)
3. Edit the footage
4. Make a Youtube account and post it

Here’s our Trailer.

Marketplace Requirements

Here are some of the things you are usually required to have:

• Buying an account: Most marketplaces require you to purchase an annual membership. iPhone for example costs 99$ a year.

• Tiles and/or Boxart: These are easy to forget despite how important they are. Each marketplace has there own specific dimensions that you MUST meet. Here is our XBLIG Box Art for Knight Souls.

• Description: Provide a good description of your game so a potential player will know what your game is and why they should buy it. If your not providing a free trial this is even more important, as the player only has this information to go off of.
• Keywords: Think of some great keywords so people can find your game easily.
• Screenshot: Most marketplaces require at least one screenshot. These usually have specific dimensions that you must follow.
• Category: Pick an appropriate category to place your game in. Here are some potential choices: action + adventure, platformer, puzzle, role playing, shooter, etc.
• Bank Account and/or PayPal: That 1$ needs to go somewhere after all.
• Platform Requirements: Each platform will have there own set of requirements you must follow. For example, Windows Phone requires a support button.

Releasing the game

Here are some things to expect when releasing the game:

• Submission period: It can take anywhere from 1 day to 2 weeks from the the day you submit, till the time it hits the marketplace. In my experience it has taken about 5 business days.
• Rejected: Your game can end up being rejected if it has bugs or if you do not meet some of the platforms requirements.

Well it’s 2:00 in the morning, I think this list will do for now. Feel free to add more to the list in the comments if I’m missing anything here.

I’d love to know how many Australian Ludum Dares happening for this October challenge?? And especially anyone in Canberra? Being a sole developer gets a bit lonely, so it would be cool to crack a beer with a fellow bleary eyed Ludum Darium at some stage during the comp and share progress and maybe even have a play of your game…

Flick me a tweet or leave a comment here.

Just finished up on my proof of concept tech demo thingy(mostly so I could reacquaint myself with unity’s component structure) – portfolio page is here or direct webplayer link is here.

So I’ve proven that I’m not entirely incompetent as far as brightly coloured simple physics are concerned. Now comes the first of what I’m sure are going to be many hard bits, the game-play.

I’m just going over all my initial idea’s to try and make a simple coherent starting point for coding, does anyone know of any good articles about getting your ideas together into a simple design doc?

also still can’t decide between Accession or Astromancer for the name …hmmm

Edit: forgot to add a pic

Now LIVESTREAMING.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 6:36 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I spent a couple of hours adding some more geometry to check frame rate and I thought I’d add a lens flare to the sun for a bit of sizzle. It’s all still running smooth!

Enjoy!

www.zombietales.net

Actually, I’ve already started. I really have no idea where I’m going with this, but I’ve got an isometric game engine thing going.

So we’ll see where it goes.

So, what is this? Well, this is my participation for the october challenge : A blocky, moody super-meat-boyesque platformer . There is even an level editor in it ! There is actually 2 levels.

But I don’t really feel the need to make money, though (I’m only 14) . So, I’ll have to misinterpret the rules, I guess .

Tags: im in, october challenge

Well after days of scrambling my brain over what kind of game this will be, I finally figured it out! This:

Never Distant End is going to be a –randomly generated text adventure game–. When creating your character you can chose between classes, gender, race(elves, dwarves, etc) and belief. After that, you go to the next screen and “roll” your stats, depending on your class, gender, etc. you get a bonus in certain attributes. Once your character is made your story scrolls across the screen, there will be certain things said in the dialogue that will add to your inventory, if it says: “He was a Wealthy man, and a hobby Sword Smith.” you can easily understand that you’ll have money in your pocket and you’ll start with a basic sword.

After you create your character you go to towns and villages and dungeons and fortresses in search for adventure. If you die its game over.

All of that is only a rough idea of Never Distant End. I hope to show gameplay sometime this week. but until then, have a good day.

So, I’m working on the web based game which should combine generated visuals, generated music and gameplay. I worked on the music part for some days now, creating a framework that allows me to compose, manipulate and generate music in the browser (actually just in Chrome, using the Web Audio API). I borrowed a lot of concepts from the SuperCollider language but left more possibilities open, which I will need when I integrate the music into the gameplay. Still a lot to fix and refine though …

• Here is a demo for Chrome Users
• Here is a rendering of the demo on Soundcloud. The sound was generated in Google Chrome.

The Kick and Snare drums are samples, everything else is synthesized. I hope my GPU gets fixed soon so I can dive into WebGL.

Well guys, it’s a few days into October, and I’m stuck trying to figure out how my teammate and I are going to make our money. Despite Wonckay and I being only 14, we’ve planned to try and rake in some dough anyway. I think I can send the money through my parents when necessary, but there’s a lot we don’t know about what we’re doing in terms of business. So, I have a few questions for those who are more experienced than I am. We’re in the U.S., and thinking about using either BMTMicro/another payment service or Desura to sell through. Forgive me if I ask anything stupid or ignorant, but let’s just say I’m not nearly as good with this as I am programming. (And I’m far from perfect with that, too, haha.)

1) I’m pretty sure that both of the aboved services, to some extent, take out some government taxes before giving you your money. What I’m not sure about is whether or not I’ll have to pay any more taxes after that- would everything be taken care of? Because if there’s one thing I don’t understand, it’s taxes, and I’m hoping they don’t get in the way.
2) What kind of business license needs to be registered? You have no idea how much research I’ve done on this without getting any solid answers. Sources say everything from “you don’t need one” to information seemingly meant for physical businesses. So, what do I need, and how should I get it? Will using Desura rather than selling it with BMTMicro make a difference? (You know, since using Desura would make us under another business.)
3) Is it even smart for us to try and be making money at this age? I know it’s risky, but I’m really hoping we can do it. I’ve seen other people who say that it would be better if the young guys here were to just forget about it, but I’m not so sure. I’d like to try out the commercial thing, you know? So please, don’t just say, “Don’t worry about the money, just have fun, stay in school, hohoho, merry Christmas!” (If it’s really that hard, maybe I can just set up a donation system from free to infinity dollars. I would definitely appreciate infinity dollars.)

Thanks in advance!

Development for Jarth is going well, and the game’s engine is almost complete.

Here is a preview of the title screen (without the buttons):

Jarth title screen without buttons (from my tumblr blog, http://noahdev.tumblr.com/ )

Bad News

As it’s apparent, my game for the Mini Ludum Dare #37 hasn’t been finished on time. Since I have other things to focus on nowadays, I stopped working on it.

Good News

Regardless, my Mini Ludum Dare #37 game will be finished someday. Though at the moment I can’t work on it, because… I have to prepare MegaFillers Flash for the October Challenge! \o/

I have made this video:

EHS 4 October

to show the current progress of the game in about 2 weeks.

Player has animations, touch control pad,physics,low poly geometry, etc

The first level consists in 2 rooms and a mage tower, all the game is related to magic and mages!, i am a bit worried about fps, with 5-7k polys for each part of the full scene (rooms and tower), 4 particle systems of 16 elements each one, collisions, object occlussion, physics, AI, animations (no lights , no shadows), the game is running at 40-50fps…
I am wondering if I would need to reduce the meshes again! Or remove particles, occlussion ,etc, so I can add bloom fx, lights and more action to improve gameplay and game itself: graphics, sounds, music, attack,fx,etc

Tags: action, adventure, egypt, game, hack & slash, iOS, iPad, iphone, mage, mages, magic, magic game, mobile games

Challenge accepted! My name is Harry Kalogirou and along with my dear friend Thanasis Lightbridge we are taking the Ludum Dare October Challenge. This was decided a few days ago, so we got together last Sunday and had a great brainstorm session. We dueled over 3-4 ideas and finaly we settled for FlyCraft.

So FlyCraft it is, and we have one month to deliver it to you. I am not going to tell you more about the game at the moment, but I already told you it is going to be a crafting game about flying. 😉 There is no prior work for the game and all will be done in the 30 days of the challenge. I will be doing the coding and Thanasis will take on the graphics and of course the music and sound effects. The game will be coded using the Sylphis3D game engine and we are going to exclusively target the Blackberry Playbook and the AppWorld store, as it is a platform I fell in love recently and it’s a platfom where you can actually make a buck these days.

Me and Thanasis will be posting here more details and progress reports so stay tuned! For now we got work to do, so catch you later!!!

About the authors:

Thanasis Lightbridge: A creative and exploring nature that creates highly descriptive and unpredictable music. His grand creation the Dol Ammad and Dol Theeta music projects. He is also responsible for the music and sound fx for the game Pop Corny.

Harry Kalogirou: Independent game developer responsible for sorrow fingers and raging addict gamers with his addictive game Pop Corny. 

I am so excited for this >,<

Although my Ludum Dare Entry wasn’t great at all (I’m still very embarrassed about it), I hope to complete a game that’s been in progress for awhile now. It’s a visual novel / baking simulator involving the Big Bang and cannibalism. As of this moment, the script is completely finished at 68,000 words. I’m working on completing the art before entering the script into the game.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 at 9:43 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This October challenge really caught my interest. All of the games I’ve made are all freeware so I have zero experience in making commercial games. Perhaps this challenge would change that?

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my game. I call it, Megamalistic. It’s a super fast action flight game where you fight super mega giant monsters and robots.

Perspective in play. That scorpion thingy is the size of a skyscraper.

It’s already a few days of progress. Right now I am just making the gameplay solid enough.

My target is that I should have a game finished by the end of the month so I could concentrate on selling it on the next.

Goodluck to us!

Greetings everyone!

I’m in for the OctoberChallenge and I’m really curious to see what I will be able to come up with.

I will take my game „Ideas“ which I made for Ludum Dare 24 and turn it into something which I hope will be commercially viable.

For everyone who missed out on my LD entry:

Ludum Dare 24: Ideas

It also received quite the favourable rankings:

#4

4.12

#20

3.92

#23

3.81

Nevertheless, I feel that I can still improve on it pretty greatly.

The name „Ideas“ will only be a working title from now on as I have come up with a new story. It will still take place inside a persons mind, but with a drastically more serious tone to it. I don’t want to give everything away right now so I’ll just tell you this much: I want to hit some Inception-Fight Club’esque emotions here!

I’m pretty confident that i can pull this off, even though the time is really short. Time shortage also partially has to do with me starting to study Computer Science at the university this month.

To better manage my workload I started to actually make 3 different TODO-lists:

• One for the entire month in which I drop everything that needs to be done at some point and then forget about it.

• One for the upcoming week. I put about one weeks worth of stuff from the bigger list in here.

• And then – you might have guessed it – one for the next day. In here I put one or two items from the weeks list.

I hope this system will help to relieve the feeling of „oh jolly good f**k – this project is (too) huge!!“, as the smaller lists really break it down into more managable chunks and help beat the procrastinating demon lurking inside of me.

Back to the game.

I aim for 1-3 hours worth of playtime in the end so there is a lot of content to be created (comparing to the 2-20 minutes of the original entry… depending on how great or sucky your platformer skills are). There will definitely need to be a handful of new game mechanics to make the journey stay fresh and interesting the whole time.

Today I finally took a leap of faith and jumped right into the horrible mess of code I left after the LD. 8 hours worth of digging and I refactored most of it and scratched some parts („UI“ and the simple scripting) which need to be redone.

Gosh, that was scary! But now I can happily start on some new features and improvements which are desperately needed for a product that eventually shall sale.

There are of course a lot more things to consider, including a simple but hopefully effective business and marketing plan. I will try to update you about my progress at least every couple of days. Until then, take this screenshot which practically still looks just like my LD entry:

Jump, Jump!

I just updated the prototype for Another Castle to 0.02

This update includes treasure chests, a yoyo attack, flying eyes, potions, heart containers, and an energy drink.

You can play it at AnotherCastleTheGame.com. I’ve also put together a quick video showing off the update, and I’m going to try and make one for each update going forward:

So I’ve watched this twice now, and didn’t enter. My idea was for my game Sky Hawks, there was no need to actually say anything, and by the end of October, the game would be done. Easy. To date, that hasn’t worked. While I have experienced a ton of growth as a developer, in the past year. I still don’t have a finished game under my belt. So this challenge, I’m aiming to break that trend (or at least get enough footage to beg for money via kickstarter or donations). I’ll post more later as I’m at work, but I’m looking forward to frequent updates. I appreciate any and all feedback as I build this. Thanks!

Indie DB Page:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/bonus-stage-inc

I’m currently in the process of making a very simple, basic, and powerful scripting language that would make the development of 2D games easy for new programmers and speedy for experienced ones. It will use the Java virtual machine to run and will not require any other software installations. There won’t be objects, but there will be some primitive types including float, long, sound, image, and boolean. The language will slightly resemble Scratch by MIT, but will only need one document of code to create a program. Also, there are no fixed objects or drag-and-drop features. It’s in the super early stages of development right now, so there’s nothing much to show. I’m really hoping to get a working prototype by the end of the year though, so wish me luck!

My entry for the October Challenge is a little puzzle game, MegaFillers Flash. It just aims to be a great implementation of a filler game, which is an existing game concept. In this game, you choose colors to expand your territory. You can’t choose your or your opponent’s actual color, but you must choose a color in each round.

An existing dev log for the game can be found here, but I’m going to post further updates on this blog.

Currently, the game is only available on FGL to play, but hopefully it will change if I find a sponsor.

Credits

Programming & Design:
MegaBrutal

Art:
Chris Socratous

Music & Sound Effects:
Lannie ‘Merlandese’ Neely III

Special Thanks:
FGL Community
R. Hill

hi guys from now on im going to be updating you with reports for my new game Noire it is going to be a first person james bond style shooter. thats all i have for now

what am i supposed to do besides make a game

So As I said in the last post “I promise to show something within the week” and well… I’m keeping my word and can say on Saturday afternoon or evening there will be be a video and screen shots, etc. of Never Distant End.

I can say for now that the game idea isn’t fully realized but it is fairly complex and in the last 2 days I have revised the idea probably 4 – 5 times.

The game is a “fancy “text adventure. Why “fancy”? mostly because it is super detailed and the world is not linear and is never the same… EVER. You start by creating your character in so many ways, then you start your adventure. When you start your adventure you are given 2-3 random perks; rich, poor, a random profession, etc. and are In a new place every time you you start. All of everything is pretty much random, all of the text that pops up on screen is randomly chosen and then randomly ad libbed. There are main quests and that’s how you beet the game, of course you might ask what happens after you beat the game? will your character get deleted? would it even be worth it? My answer… When you beat the main quest you start a new game with the character you just beat the game with, just starts on a higher difficulty and ties in a bit with the previous story. At the moment I’m working on Enemies, Items and just finished basic status Ailments(Poison, Paralyze, Sleep) .

That’s all I wanted to say at this point. I’m having fun and hope I stay true to my promise of having something to see by Saturday. till then

We’re in! We actually started on the 1st so this will be like a month long jam for us, I’ve never had to complete something in such a short space of time so it’ll be a good challenge. We decided on a simple score attack space racing game. We’ve got a working prototype already and I’m currently fine tuning the controls while Farcloud figures out the audio/visual direction of the game. We’ve got lots of ideas and it’s been really fun so far! I’ll be posting the occasional blog at prepixel.com for those who are interested.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with!

I was planning to polish up my 2-player versus LD24 game Triple Threat and put it on iOS soon, so this challenge is well timed for me. Definitely shooting for ipad, not sure about iphone, and will explore options for selling/distributing mac/pc versions. Post-Ludum updated version is available here.

Feedback and suggestions are very welcome!

I’m in. I just got haxe setup on my computer and I’m ready to start working on an idea I’ve had for some time.

Here’s the first screenshot of what I’ve got so far:

Humble beginnings.

Things I still need to do:

1. Make the game.
2. Make it not suck.
3. Make it look good.
4. Make it sound good.
5. Make an attractive website for it.
6. Make sure it works on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
7. Submit to the Apple App Store.
8. Submit to the Android Market.
9. Submit to some flash game site.
10. Make a buck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2012 at 7:08 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Here is the video from these days progress:

Now I could export the game to iOS 6.0. It works with iPad3 and iPhone5!
Bad news are that the game in iPod/iPhone 3G will not be available and in iPhone 3GS too slow…
I’m trying to make this better. Here is the discussion in our engine forum:
http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=26748

Tags: 3D, action, adventure, egypt, hack & slash, iOS, progress, shiva

I’ve posted a very significant update for MegaFillers Flash on FGL. I thought to relay it here.

The game has been updated! Notes on the new version:

– Added new vines to panels (thanks to Chris).
– Music fades after the round ends.
– Added new shaped table: “V”.
– Changed _rrh’s name to “R Hill” in the Credits, according to his request, and added his blog as the URL to open.
– Added sound effect to the table size selector grid in the “New Game” menu (thanks to Merlandese).
– FGL: Set game to 100% complete and put it on bid.

At this point, the MegaFillers Flash project announces a feature freeze. The game is considered complete, no new features or major changes may be implemented from this point.
However:
– major bugs may still be fixed;
– new shaped tables may still be added;
– changes asked by the future sponsor may still be performed.

MegaFillers Flash will be entered into Ludum Dare’s October Challenge! Let’s hope I’ll manage to sell it within October!

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.

Well, for LD#23 I created a game based on the theme “Tiny World” which was essentially a 2D RTS. Similar to the Stronghold series of games…

It was NOT successful at all, in fact I ended the third day having not completed the project to a degree where I was  happy with it.

It was ended with unpolished features and hacky code.

This October challenge I’m going to take SmallVille, polish it beyond belief, then publish it.

Thank you Ludum Dare for encouraging me again!

I doubt I’ll participate in October Challenge, but I’m not being idle this month. I’m working on a project, thought I’ll not release it for these reasons:

• It’s not a game. Yes, MiniLD #37 is over, but I need it by myself.
• It’ll consist of parts those will be hard to assemble. Something will be made with Construct Classic, something with Phyard Builder, maybe part with Construct 2.
• It’ll be hard to customize for other users. They just won’t understand anything.

It’ll be related to music and videos. I don’t know fully yet. Anyway, it’s my chance to learn file manipulating.

Summary: this post was made just for a notification that I’m not idle.

Yep, that is my dimensional-with colours-game-thing. Eventually improve. Patience.

Tags: Game Maker, october challenge

Bloblocks is nearly nearly nearly complete!

Only 21 puzzles to create… at least that’s a concrete count down.

I had this nice feeling today, that the end is really only a few days ahead, and not in a virtually infinite future!

If only there wasn’t all the marketing tasks lurking in the dark

I wrote a more complete post on my blog…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 at 8:06 am and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Bam!  First screenshot.  I know it looks a bit shabby, but hopefully things will look better once I start working on the art.  Also, I’ve started a dev blog, because I’m told that the thing to do.

I had a really productive coding session I got my reload animations and ammo count working. My Zombie Dollars are ticking over, and my most favourite of all the rag doll deaths actually works in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4s just fine. It’s too much fun check out the video

This October Challenge will be my first, and if everything runs okay, it will be my actual startup.

My plan:

1. Publish my portfolio page that I finished recently
2. Finish, polish and publish not just one but TWO of my nearly finished games

And which games I want to finish?

• Chemistry Lab – my first almost finished game. The player has to collect a certain elements and avoid others. It’s quite simple, but very catching and fun.

• Little Farmer – I started working on this game mainly in order to repeat all the useful features and learn ActionScript 3 properly (I worked in ActionScript 2 long time ago). On the occasion of my sister’s birthday, I decided to expand it, put it into farming environment and dedicate it to her at last. I admit that this game isn’t very fun yet, but I’ve learned soo much with it.

Hopefully I will be able to make the October challenge this year. I have two games currently under development right now – a construction and management simulation game, and some not-yet-categorized game where you fly a ship around planets and stuff. I hope to use the latter for October challenge. Development is going well with it. The ship now turns, can accelerate, deccelerate and coast to a stop. Collision detection isn’t up yet, and won’t be for a while, since I will be writing the infinite map o’ planets now.(sorta like minecraft seeds for world gen, except with planets.)

If you look at it a certain way, then I’m almost done. If you look at it the real way, then all that’s left is the stuff I’m not good at.

Squares!

More details on my dev blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 at 9:22 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi guys,

Rialgar and I really enjoyed developing HTML5 games during the past LD compos, but we were curious what could be achieved with more time than just one weekend. So we gave us some months and developed an HTML5 MMO demo.

The terrain is generated procedurally by a Java server and transmitted via a WebSocket. The whole scenery is rendered by the awesome three.js library I also used for my last LD entry. The server takes care of client synchronization so you can see other players moving around. We also implemented a rudimentary combat system.

To make the world a little bit more interesting, we added an editor so that players can create own structures like houses or trees and add them to the world.

It’s not a complete MMO though as it is missing features like a level system, quests or dungeons, but we think it shows what HTML5 is capable of.

Play it here: http://shards-game.net (best played with Google chrome)

Yep, Ive been absent for quite a while.

But  coincidently, I just got my publishing keys to Google Play, so, why not try my hands at this challenge?

Firstly, I’m imposing myself a challenge inside this challenge: how fast can I code a simple game like a minesweeper? I should handle this easily, after all, until some 6 months ago, for almost 3 years, I was a professional casual game developer.

And so, I sat yesterday to start it. In a very TDD way, I wrote most of the premise code, some simple framework to the Android Activity flux. Right now, I have most of the code in place, but not everything is plugged in, since it still require some refactoring to conform to everything else.

Now, the oblig. screenshot:

Of course, this is very wrong, from a minesweeper point of view. But I must tell you the tiles are reversed. And everything behind the “unrevealed” tiles are being rendered the same.

I plan to release this TODAY.

My second project for this month, and I’m going to work on it next weekend, is a life-game-based arcade game: You shoot goo ( gosper gliders ) and you must erradicate all remaining goo.

I wrote this game before, I must admit. It was the very first thing I wrote when my former boss (from the game studio) gave me some time to acquaint myself with the iPhone SDK. It was cool, but buggy as hell. Now I want to write it in Java for Android, with proper graphics and everything.

My third project for the month is GOOD remake in Android for my MiniLD#26 game: Knights of Alentejo. Currently, it works in a very flawed state, but requires a keyboard and lacks menus and everything else. I will make it into a POLISHED game.

My final (and very unlikely) project for the month is to take my pet project, a 3D game engine I’m writing in Android Java and make a simple “Stealth Spy” game out of it. Since it has sort of dynamic lightning, I want to make something different out of it, other than another FPS.

And thats pretty much all I want to do. Of course, everything will be free, ad-free and open source. Hope you guys enjoy it!

UPDATE:

Things look a little more promising. But of course, I need better. BADLY.

Gonna ask my GF to make me something better. She’s a really good artist.

It’s screenshot Saturday, and you know what that means. Screenshots! Last weekend, I improved the look and feel of the GUI system, and this morning, I added in tooltips. http://isotower.com/media/tooltips.png

This is also my official entry post to the 2012 October Challenge. Technically, I’ve already sold a few copies of Isotower, but it’s not much, and it needs to be more. Way more. This month, my goal is to get more of the game finished, and do some advertising and campaigning to get some more notice of the game out there, and hopefully get some sales to happen. This is basically me dusting off a game I haven’t touched in a little while and spending my time working on it, in earnest.

I had a good couple of dev session, added more geometry and got my blood HUD working. And my Zombies can now actually attack and hurt you! It’s feeling pretty fun to play now.

More screenies at www.zombietales.net

^ This is my game‘s status on FGL. I’ve set it for bidding 2 days ago, but it hasn’t been approved yet by the FGL Staff. Below, there is some more info:

“Your game is awaiting approval and analysis by our team before it will be visible to potential sponsors. This usually takes 3 to 5 days.“

Most probably it depends on the actual workload, but according to my own experience so far, FGL used to be pretty much quick. They used to answer questions within a day, and once I ordered a pre-review, it was done within an hour – despite they say a pre-review takes about a week. They are really great guys!

Though as far as I know, they don’t work on weekends – my previous experience backs it up: they never answered to me during weekends. Since they didn’t approve my game on Friday, they surely won’t do it until Monday. I don’t want to be impatient, but still, this is the very first game I ever sell. Of course, I’m excited – what happens? What will sponsors think about my game? What bids will I receive? So I can’t wait my game being approved. I should be patient…

Anyway, how do you set an avatar for your Ludum Dare profile?

After some work, I managed to get a test build of the game running and connected to the Kongregate API (for leaderboards and badges or whatever):

And here is Ethereal Isles running on a Nexus 7, for deployment via Google Play.

Now that those test developments work, I need to fill out the paperwork for an LLC. Why? I could just take all this income as myself (sole proprietorship essentially) but I might as well get started on setting a real business. Unfortunately, the filing for an LLC might take up to 20 days! Yikes! I should still get it by the end of month if I’m lucky.

I also put up a test build of Ethereal Isles for your playtesting pleasure using the Unity Web Player plugin. There is only a “sandbox level” available. If you try it, let me know which monsters and abilities did or didn’t seem worth the effort to use, and if it is too hard or too easy to defeat all the enemies on the island.

Please have a look at this gallery from nearly all the entries for the Mini Ludum Dare 37.

Bigger versions of the screenshots and a short summary can be found on my blog:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I hope you all enjoyed the themes “not-games” and “real real-time” as much as I did. I wanted people to think about the rigid definitions of what games are and if those definitions even are necessary to create interesting and compelling experiences. And yes, most of the entrants succeeded in surprising and entertaining me – for that I want to thank you all, and also for forgiving the somewhat too long theme announcement.

Tags: gallery, not-games, real-time, screenshots, summary

As we are getting ready to finish the game, we put together a trailer to showcase the gameplay to you guys:

Evo Dash Trailer

Hope you like it! The game right now is mostly feature-complete, and we are working on fixing bugs, taking care of resolution issues, optimizing for older iOS devices, etc. After the release on iTunes, we will see how the game does and if it pays off enough, we will get to work on an Android version, which should be ready in a couple of weeks.

I got sick since the last post thus I couldn’t work for 2 days. “Dude you could have been working the 2 days you where sick!”… No I couldn’t have, I was so sore on Friday and couldn’t move anything without feeling a numbness or slight pain and yesterday I just didn’t feel like working at all. So I have today and tomorrow(Canadien Thanks Giving) to do as much work as I can. I’ll see what I can do to show you something by tonight.

Since I can’t really figure out some Story generating problems I guess I’ll work on combat. Ya…. combat in a text adventure game… Awesome…

Have a good one. :3

I will try to do the October challenge! This will be my first game. I hope to use Java 2d rather than html5 because I want to make the $1 off sales rather than adds on a website not to mention buying the domain. I guess the hardest part of this will be finding a place to sell… Perhaps you guys have some ideas? The game will be a space shooter if you were wondering.