Thanks to this month’s MiniLD, I may get to do awesome things for the price of one!

1. Finish making a game for the first time in 13 years
2. Complete my barely-started LD #25 entry for the theme ‘You Are the Bad Guy’
3. Make my January entry for One Game A Month

The game is still untitled. In it, you compete against other evil entities to swallow the most galaxies, thus ending the universe. In practice, it is just a re-theme of Hey! That’s My Fish, but I think it is turning out pretty cool It will definitely have hotseat support and really bad AI, but I will try to add the following by the end of the MiniLD:

• Remote multiplayer support
• Better AI
• Cool graphics effects
• An installer
• SFXR-level sound effects
• Music-generator-level music

In case you hadn’t noticed, I like lists. If you do too, consider using WorkFlowy!

It looks like my bolstered confidence from this jam was indeed justified. I have submitted to 4 LDs including this one, but for this LD, I set a new personal best in every single category in which I got a rating (except Coolness). Not all of those new records are by a significant amount, though; the reason I’m so happy is not because of the improvements in my strongest categories, but the improvements in my weakest categories- the quality of my work is more consistent across categories without having lost any of my strengths. I still have to refine my methods a good deal, but the changes in my work habits I resolved to make for this LD paid off. This is my first solid evidence that I’m actually getting better at this.

So, why’d I do how I did in each category, and how do I improve?

#76. Innovation – 3.67 (previous best: 3.64, LD21)
I usually do well here, but I was still surprised at my performance this time, because I deliberately constrained my brainstorming.  As I mentioned in my “I’m In” post, I wrote “NO GAME GENRE REFERENCES ALLOWED” in large letters across the top of my brainstorming sheet.  However, I also made sure not to accept an idea unless it was low-scope enough to actually pull off well (I was SERIOUSLY tempted to go with a cooler but much higher-scope idea).  As a result, I adopted a rather generic arcade-style gameplay structure to maintain that low scope, but the primary gameplay mechanic isn’t quite like any game I know of, since it wasn’t designed with any existing game or genre in mind.  While almost certainly something new, it’s still nothing hugely out of the ordinary.  If I want to improve, I’ll have to find ideas in that small overlap between “low-scope” and “attention-grabbingly unique”- quite a difficult task.

#94. Theme – 3.83 (previous best: 3.80, LD21)
I’m also a bit surprised about how this was my highest-rated category. I thought it was a pretty standard implementation of the theme… perhaps people liked how I offered a sympathetic portrayal of the “villain”, but that was just in text outside of the game proper.  Improving here’s not my highest priority, but as long as I don’t keep my idea too much of  stretch from the theme, hopefully it’ll improve hand-in-hand with Innovation.

#174. Fun – 3.25 (previous best: 3.05, LD23)
This is always my highest priority, but also hard to complete satisfactorily within 48 hours. As per my game-design training, the gameplay has a solid “core” (the challenge of picking up humans without dropping them). However, I was aware going in that I would get a few marks down for some gameplay flaws that could easily be fixed given more time (i.e. humans staying out of reach, weird chain-of-humans physics). I intentionally saved these kinds of tweaks for later. In the past, I’ve fixed an emergent flaw as soon as I detected it, but this caused me to neglect other aspects of gameplay, as well as almost all of the graphics and audio, preventing me from working on a more “complete” experience.

#181. Overall – 3.33 (previous best: 3.00, LD23)
I like how this was my biggest non-audiovisual improvement. I think it reflects the fact that this is a more “complete” product than my past entries, as I mentioned previously.  This was the first time I feel like I properly scoped for 48 hours. I do still need to improve on “completeness”, though, and I think that’s the primary way I’ll be able to improve my Overall rating. The graphics and audio, while present to the degree they “need” to be, were still noticeably bare-minimum, and the gameplay still needs some more polish (see “Fun”).

#206. Audio – 2.92 (previous best: 2.18, LD23)
My most-improved category for obvious reasons (for the first time, I have music). I suspect this was brought down by a noob mistake I made and didn’t find out about until well into the rating period: after each round, the game started playing a new instance of the background music from the beginning, but kept playing the previous instance of the music at the same time. I’m going to be a bit more rigorous with my audio testing in the future to make sure nothing like this happens again.

#272. Graphics – 3.17 (previous best: 2.69, LD24)
I’m surprised that my programmer-art got me above the 3.00 threshold. I guess I just have to keep making sure that I don’t include any assets well beyond my drawing capabilities- though I was kind of proud of the way I disguised the collision boxes with the design of the mothership. I think, if I am to improve here, I have to go for a consistent, stylized aesthetic (ideally minimalistic), and find the time to do non-essential things like illustrated instructions, non-default UI graphics, background imagery, and “juicy” visual effects.

#1048. Coolness – 22% (current best: 32%, LD23)
As usual, I struggled to find time to rate other participants’ games, between holiday plans (including a trip to New York for New Year’s Eve), commitments with friends (as students at different colleges, winter break is the only chance we really have to catch up with each other), and various obligations.  I’m graduating in May- hopefully, come LD27, I’ll have more free time.

Humor – N/A (current best: 3.25, LD21)
I included a little humorous story on the game’s ratings page, but I didn’t really intend the game to be all that humorous… just cute/lighthearted fun.

Mood – N/A (current best: 2.53, LD23)
I know I find mood hard to rate for most games (and usually abstain), and I’m betting most other voters do too. Like I said, I was going for a cute/lighthearted aesthetic, but I’m not sure it’s really stylized enough to constitute a “mood”… I guess the voters agreed. Plus, I think some voters use the Mood category only for melancholy or artsy aesthetics… those are the only ones I find easy to rate myself.

Also demanding PC games with great graphics will soon run on tablets – at least that is the advantage with AMD wants to score in the market currently dominated by ARM flat computer. As evidence, the company was on the consumer electronics show CES in Las Vegas, one of the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Wistron tablet built on Windows 8(Sanei N10) with the game Dirt Showdown.This title is correct, as well as former Dirt Racing, well optimized on the Radeon GPUs from AMD and was not entirely liquid – yet provides the graphics with HDR effects and particle systems, most tablet games in the shade. Golem.de could even go with a wireless controller a few laps, which made quite fun. On the full HD display at usual viewing distance no individual pixels were to be seen.The idea of ​​having such a tablet that in the case of Wistron device with mechanical keyboard can also set up like a notebook, on a flight to play like on a PC or console is appealing. The only question is whether the battery and also to the way from Germany to Las Vegas goes where plan at least ten hours of flight time are. At run time, AMD was not specified, only that the quad-core SoC will need codenamed Temash under 5 watts, said AMD’s product manager Lisa Su.If one of Intel’s dual-core Atom Z2760 proceeds, which receives less than 3 (ampe a10)watts of power, and in tablets so far has between six and eight hours, should come Temash a similar configuration of the device at least five hours.

This is also the context in which move other portable consoles with much smaller screens and less added value.With Temash based on the Jaguar architecture, AMD will create a new device category, the “Performance Tablets”. AMD sees a gap between the devices, which are designed mainly for Internet applications and the use of media, and such devices, which can also serve as a full-fledged notebook. Performance Tablets should be lighter than convertible notebooks, still run the x86 version of Windows 8 and almost as long as notebooks endure. If it works, should be seen in the second quarter of 2013, when the first Temash devices come to market.Even before the Asus U38 is expected to one of AMD’s first new Ultrabook (freelander price)equivalent balances here – called Ultra Thin – for the shelter of Intel brand. Then also expect new processors, code-named “Richland”, which build on the Piledriver cores.This is clear from the information provided by Su roadmap containing as already expected except Richland no new major CPUs for desktops and laptops fast. 2013, AMD focused more so on mobile devices – and leaves with the fast Intel CPUs that will renew the company with Haswell, the field without a fight.

Tags: tablet pc

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 at 2:05 am and is filed under MiniLD #39. 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.

Hello people, the main plug of info on programming that I take (The reason I know all the programming languages I know) Codecademy, has released a new course on API’s teaching you all you need to know on API’s! Finally with an API I can get  more stable games, and do expect me to have Bells up quicker with that! With it, i’ll to all the API… thingy’s. But do expect more HTML games, more better content, and better websites, along with games done faster. TILL NEXT LUDUM. Mohammad. Bai.

This time I’ll be making an entry for MiniLD #39. But not just it! I’ll also submit it for “OneGameAMonth” and a local competition “Digital Wind”.

I’ll make a point-and-click game with scenes from my memories. Not something happened to me, but something I thought about but didn’t use. For example, a scene from a dream I saw several years ago. It’s great, isn’t it? I feel like all of myself are coming into one place.

Last time I entered LD #25 giving MOAI a spin and being generally out of practice with game development. I was not able to complete my (surprisingly complicated) game idea in the time provided. I chose MOAI because I’d been exploring different game platforms and that was my first stop. Since then I’ve been looking at Haxe + NME + HaxePunk. For those who wonder:

Haxe is a programming language based on Actionscript. The compiler is multiplatform and can target C++, SWF, Neko VM, PHP, Javascript and to some extent C# and Java. This means you can use the same source code to compile multiple targets and produce native (read: fast) executables. NME simplifies this build process a good deal and adds project files, asset management, and a graphical API among other things. HaxePunk is a port of FlashPunk to work with NME. It’s a game library, providing a particle emitter, sprite maps, entity management, collision detection, and animation. An alternative to HaxePunk is Flixel, or you could roll your own game library on top of Haxe/NME.

One thing I like over MOAI is the greater variety of targets. I can compile and run my game in the Neko VM using nme test myproject.nmml neko, which builds pretty fast and launches the game. Then change neko to flash to build a SWF instead. Then change it mac or windows and it begins churning out C++ and creating a native build. Or change it to ios, android, html5, linux, etc. That’s pretty nice. Caveats include you can’t build some targets from some platforms (notably IOS from Windows), and there are some gotchas where some behaviors are slightly different between platforms, but overall I’m pleased with this set up.

Although I’m late to the party I thought I’d commit to producing a game for MiniLD 39, and use it for One Game a Month. I figure I come up with a game design that I think should be completable in 2 days … then with some luck I have a chance at just finishing it in 8 days.

Editor: Sublime Text 2
Language: Haxe/NME
Framework: HaxePunk, HaxePunk-AI
Visuals: Photoshop, FilterForge
Audio: Audacity, VLC, Bfxr, Autotracker-py
Version Control: Copy and paste

By the way if you missed the keynote video by McFunkypants at One Game a Month, he ends it with this great quote from Ira Glass:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All
of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But
there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not
that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your
taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your
taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this
phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went
through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing
that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just
starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and
the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a
deadline so that every week you will finish one [thing]. It is only by going
through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will
be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do
this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take
awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Tags: MiniLD #39, OneGameAMonth

My Mini-LD game is one that I started but never finished.

It was a one-button game titled “Foxy Ninja”, which I’m renaming to “Mini Ninja”.

In it, you play as a ninja who has to perform various tasks to infiltrate a castle and kill the samurai that killed your master.

The game will feature the following player actions:

• Walking and jumping
• Walking and sprinting
• Walking and stopping
• Charged-up jumping
• Throwing shurikens (ninja throwing stars)
• A final boss fight

It will feature the following obstacles:

• Holes in the floor
• Spike floors
• Retracting blade traps
• Laser traps
• TNT boxes
• Enemy ninjas
• Final boss

I will post more about this as I go and will be uploading it as a demo (and eventually a finished game) on Flash Game License as I progress.

Hello. I have seen beautiful pixel art in the games here. I have been doing pixel art myself for some time, but it was always static. Now I think I should learn animation. I usually used Gimp to create graphics, but Gimp has close to no support for animations. So… what program do you use to create animated pixel art?

Layers, filters, or anything fancy isn’t necessary. All I need is a pencil tool, preferably a color selector, and a dynamic preview to see the animation. It seems like not much, but I don’t know any program like that. Also, I would kind of like it to be free~~~

Thanks in advance.

My entry for MiniLD 39 has been posted http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-39/?action=preview&uid=15656 The hindsight for this entry was what would I have done had a school shooting right before LD#25 had not happened and I went with my original idea for that theme instead of a non-violent game.

Zombie Forever level 1 game play

Tags: strategy, turn-based, zombies

Hey, I guess I should have written this update a few weeks ago… Bad hotel, a game that I made back in LD20 and then remade for iOS in a more finished version with my company has been nominated for a IGF award in the audio category. Super exciting, off to GDC!

Tags: SuccessStory

http://thehill.com/images/stories/blogs/flooraction/jan2013/hr287.pdf

6 SEC. 2. RATING LABEL REQUIREMENT FOR VIDEO GAMES.
7 (a) CONDUCT PROHIBITED.—It shall be unlawful for
8 any person to ship or otherwise distribute in interstate
9 commerce, or to sell or rent, a video game that does not
10 contain a rating label, in a clear and conspicuous location

on the outside packaging of the video game, containing
2 an age-based content rating determined by the Entertain-
3 ment Software Ratings Board.

Humans were always fascinated by fire!. I made this now in a bit less than 3 hours and I’m proud of myself! This is my first animated pixel (actually second, my first was a shitty running person).

Graphicsgale is a great program for this kind of work and I found out it works fine in Ubuntu using Wine (something I had often problems with). The free version doesn’t export to gif, but you can export a series of images and convert them from command line with imagemagick (example here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1034104) .

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2013 at 9:53 pm and is filed under MiniLD #39. 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.

We were interviewed on fight4game during Ludum Dare 25, and the footage has finally been edited and released: I’m afraid it’s all in French, but you get a decent look at the room were were in

I can’t seem to embed youtube videos, so here is a direct link.

I want to point out for those who do speak French that I was exhausted (this was taken Saturday morning: remember that in France we start at 3am) and that French isn’t my mother-tongue – sure, I repeat myself a lot, but considering the circumstances I think it went pretty well

Tags: fight4game, interview, montpellier, video

I had never participated to Ludum Dare. Sometimes because of lack of inspiration, very often because of lack of time, sometimes because when I noticed that the jam had began, it was already ended. For Ludum Dare 25 that was organized last month, I was aware of it just some hours after the launch. The theme was inspiring and I also had a funny (at least in my opinion) idea.

(this post is an english translation of my original post on my blog  here).

But as it’s often the case, I also had a week-end with very little time for this activity. Even in the Jam category, which is specifically organized for those on who the “real life” as un impact, which is a day longer and smoother rules, it felt like it was too short for me.

So I worked a bit the subject in my head, but after 24 hours without having the chance to really concentrate and produce something, I abandoned the idea to enter the jam.

Meanwhile, I was looking at what Ebene was doing after she announced her entry on a well known social network.

On Sunday evening, she announced that the developer she found for the project wouldn’t be able to finish it. So I’ve looked closely to what had already been done in terms of Game Design and Graphics. I liked it. On the programming side, it felt it was doable in a week-end of time for someone who can really concentrate. I thought I would be able to found the same number of hours in a week time.

So I told Ebene I’d do what I can. No guaranty. On my side, clean my Javascript and HTML skills on a real project is great for improving myself. So, let’s go.

After a week, the game implementation is at a correct level. Some added hours the next week have been added to smooth the rough edges.

In the post-mortem tradition, I’ll answer next two questions : what can I improve and what went well?

What can I improve?

Javascript

My former experiences had already given me the taste of it. This is not a surprise to me that language was considered badly before the creation of AJAX then HTML5. Iterations are quick (add a function, reload the page,…) but the number of traps in this language slowed me a lot at the beginning, while I was remembering them.

While developing, stupid mistakes went scarcer but never completely gone.

I was on the run without too much possibility of stopping to build myself a comfortable environment. But at the end of the development, I searched for static analysis programs like “jhlint”. This allowed me to improve a couple of things, but that would have been really interesting from the beginning of the development to avoid a test when a file has syntax error and is just not loaded into the browser.

My conclusion is that Javascript really needs a toolchain to continuously verify the obvious mistakes. Most of the tools I’ve tested are heavy to launch, which decrease the raw iteration time, while maybe improving the quality in the long run.

Another way of study would be to study languages build upon Javascript, like CoffeeScript or Dart.

Quality tools

Static analysis or test framework are tools I cannot program without in my daily professional environment. As I didn’t know them enough for this project to rely on them, I didn’t use any.

Before starting a new session of this kind, I must have found, tested and almost mastered such tools for the Javascript world. These are great time improver and time is a precious resource.

Deployment / Collaboration

We were two on the project. Ebene was producing the Game Design document, the graphic resources, the HTML integrations and the game data. All these data were available on a web server for me to fetch.

On my side, I was providing the zip archive extracted from a Mercurial depot, containing the working (most of the time) game.

The steps for me were:

– updating the new data with wget when an update was available
– data copy on my depot
– comparing the updates (mostly the HTML/CSS files) and manually update the in the final integration files.
– export of game data to the file format used by the program (OSD to JSON)
– verify / submit

Then, after a session of work on an improvement:

– archive creation
– send the archive by sftp to a HTTP served depot
– tell about the update

These are a lot of manual operation that should be automated. What I see for improvements:

– work on a commoin depot; not a must have, but really interesting
– for an HTML game, a better integration process by better thinking how to fetch the new page updates
– automated export of data
– continuous build system with static analysis and deployment.

What went well?

1. A pretty well detailed game design document and a function first version of the game data. Thanks to Ebene for that. Apart from some written questions on some points, I was able to go fast with a good idea of what would the game look like, even if I really discovered it while programming it.

2. Le platform choice. Even with what I just said on Javascript, using scripted HTML is good for this kind of game.

A test editor, a browser with developer tools (I’ve used Firefox + Firebug) are ok. The few data needed by the game allowed to start quickly and work by little iterations.

3. Development loop

The development loop I’ve globally followed was: choice for a missing feature, feature prototype, writting the complete feature, cleaning.

Regularly cleaning the code avoided too much technical debts, even while missing quality tools.

Even on small project, the technical debt can quickly rise and crush any speed in your programming. And what comes with it this decrease in speed is the rise of frustration because of bugs.

This also allowed me to separate the responsibilities in the code. Mainly the game logic from the HTML integration.

4. Developing Time

Because I wanted to know if it was really possible for a dedicated guy to achieve the same amount of work during a game jam, I’ve tracked the number of hours on the project for the programming part.

The “Beta” level for the game (working game with a few minor bugs) took my around 20 hours, 5 of them really dedicated and without distraction.

I guess that for someone with a good environment during the event would have spend 10 to 15 hours. Fair enough for a game jam.

After the beta version, little improvements and bug fixes took me something around 2 to 3 hours spread in a week long period.

Conclusion

This was a really interesting experience and the result is pleasing. I’ve improved my skills in Javascript + HTML on a real project with new ideas to improve the way I work. My personal objective is to improve on my productivity to get the most of those few little time period I can spend on hobby programming.

And the game? It’s here (for a better experience, switch to full screen with, probably, the F11 key)

You can also read: the post presenting the game, explanations, game design and much more or the previous post.

Tags: ld25, post-mortem

We have finalised a post-compo version of The Launch, fixing a few bugs and reducing the resolution to a more laptop friendly 1280×720.
The How to Play guide has also been improved.

Aside from that, the game is mostly unchanged but it should be alot more accessible now as its possible to read the instructions.

Please play and rate it here:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/tupperwarespoon/the-launch

Short and sweet and located on my blog.

http://rainbladestudios.blogspot.com/2013/01/post-mortem-ludum-dare-25.html

You all rock, by the way. Keep it up. I love the community here.

Since the LD, I’ve been doing many things but also working on polishing my game. It is still remarkably similar to the compo entry.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ddsy8euhqo3u82/dragns6a2.jar

Hi all!

This is a shameless re-post of my Stack Exchange Game Development question of the same name.

In my 2D side-scroller game I have a bunch of actors being drawn, each of which has a single, non-animated Texture (a png image). These actors all inherit from a base GameActor class.

I want to add some more NPC’s (e.g. tanks or cannons) that have one texture that doesn’t move (the base) and another that rotates to shoot at things (the gun / barrel). How should I structure my Actor class hierarchy so as to allow for this? Should I refactor my base Actor class to allow for N textures? Or should I create a brand new sort of Actor for things that need > 1 texture (and then have to manage these actors separately from ‘regular’ actors)? Or is there a better approach I can’t see?

Thus far I’ve been opting to keep things as simple as possible (KISS, right?), but am not sure how to proceed.

Any pointers greatly appreciated.

Here is my entry for the mini LD 39 :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-39/?action=preview&uid=10471

Click to know the hindsight 😉

It’s here! After a lot of hard work, I’ve turned my Ludum Dare 25 entry into January’s One Game A Month, and released it for sale!

Check out the page on my blog here for more information, as well as a link to purchase it. Among other new features is an endless mode in which, quite fittingly, you must defeat heroes endlessly until you are defeated. Go for a new record!

I have two codes, each for 33% off!

Tags: #1GAM, mr wizard, SuccessStory

Over the course of the past 2 weeks I have worked on a game for minld39. The game is not a finished game but I am in 1gam so I’ll continue to work on it. It’s called Light Years Ahead, I think. (Not at my computer right now + the name might change) It’s nothing to brag about, just a side to side space shooter like Galaga. What I’m most happy about is that I have conquered the art of infinite objects and I can carry this skill to different games in the future.

Game submission tonight;I’m pumped.

My postmortem for my Mini-Ludum Dare #39 entry Zombie Forever has been posted. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2013/01/mini-ludum-dare-39-postmortem.html . Quick summary for those too lazy to read it:

What went right:

– Going with a Jam challenge instead of going solo

– Zombie feel

What went wrong

-over-ambitious tendencies strike back

-AI resulting in humans killing each other and turning into zombies.

Tags: postmortem

Hey everyone,

I’m remaking my first LD entry, World Panic, wich you can play here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11711

Original:

Remake:

I’m using Unity3D. It’s gonna be finished soon with the same original levels and I’ll add some more. I’ll release for Android and Web (and Windows maybe).

I’ve spent some time on my Ludum Dare 25 game ‘The Twist’, and have now released it for Android.  Got a new high score system, added some new graphics, some time bonus powerups, and other little features.  I’ve also got a new game mode in the works.  I thought those who played it during voting might be interested!

The full version is 99c, but I’ve also released a free version with some limited features (no time bonuses, and no online scoring).  Hope you enjoy it!  Looking forward to the next LD.

View it on iTunes here.

Ludum Dare 24 was my first time entering the compo and I managed to get a simple game entered just in time called Drum Beat Evolution!!!

See the LD24 Entry here.

It’s a colourful Drum Beat Maker with the added twist of never being able to stop or pause, causing the song to evolve as you go along. I was happy to see that it was enjoyed by those who played it. When I saw that it had come in 8th in the category ‘Audio’ I rushed around telling everyone I knew.

When the compo was over I decided that I would port it to iPhone. I didn’t actually know anything about iOS development. My most relevant experience was C. I downloaded XCode and poked around a little bit and was quite intimidated. I purchased ‘Sams Teach yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 hours’ and started going through the lessons and found by the 6th Chapter/Hour I had learned enough to stumble through making the app.

As most will relate to, this really is the start of the dream for me. Making a steady income to support me through making indie games. I do hope to make many more. If you played the entry and own an iPhone or iPad I hope you’ll check it out and help me get it noticed. It seems like the app store is very overpopulated and it’s easy to go unnoticed.

Drum Beat Evolution!!!!

trap room

a short puzzle about escaping from a room full of trap

play on kongregate

this is my first game this year, as I’m joined #onegameamonth

this is my 3rd game so far, and actually my first non-jam game because the other two are LD game

I created this with flashpunk+ogmo editor ex

when i’m creating this, i’m thinking about making some simple game with simple mechanic that i actually can do it and finish it. i’m choosing puzzle genre because i think for simple game, puzzle will be the best choice. well, i dunno how this turn out before i get some feedback, but i hope you will enjoy this game…

Tags: flashpunk, OneGameAMonth, puzzle

I’m pleased to have finished a game for mini ludum dare #39:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-39/?action=preview&uid=17811

The theme was hindsight. I’m surprised more people don’t do the miniLDs. Two weeks is a luxurious deadline in comparison to the 2-day compo. I didn’t complete the compo last time so I think the mini was a good step for me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 at 2:12 pm and is filed under MiniLD #39. 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.

Just got done with GGJ / Game a Month for January. Check out our result here:
http://peculiar-motion.com/?p=127

Cannot wait for the next big jam.

I had big plans for this month, but fell ill and couldn’t make what I planned. Yesterday I realized it’s the end of the month, so I should hurry and make a game at least for the OneGameAMonth.

I qucikly (under 24 hours) made a game. It’s a simple arcade game with original mechanics. It’s called “Zoom”. Play it and give feedback!

I’m very pleased with results. The game is easy to play but addicting, and it looks great.

Debuting with my ludum dare account, let’s see what the fuss is this all about.

I had meant to submit this for the latest MiniLD, but couldn’t quite make the (generous) deadline. However, I’m very pleased with how it turned out, so I thought I’d share anyway. In particular, the 3d modelling went well but was time consuming. The code went smoothly, although I need to figure out a better system for triggering plot events…On the downside, I didn’t get to any character modelling, so I just used a standard rig for every character, which is less than ideal. Although there is music and sound, it was done in less than 3h, so it doesn’t really fit.

Here’s a bit of the concept. I got bit carried away with the writing (: So much fun:

The discovery of Procrastination, as it came to be known, was, like many great discoveries, almost instantly abused. At first, governments and corporations fought to control the Timezones in the hopes of untold financial gain, then, inevitably, for untold power. However, the effective creation and control of a Timezone is a complex and consuming task, and only those with the most sophisticated technology had any hope of emerging victorious from the ensuing turmoil. In the end, one group, as terrifyingly ruthless as they were intelligent, managed to gain complete control over all Timezone activity. They continue to hold that position today – they are the Disciples of a Strict Chronology.

Grab it here!

Hi! My first entry to the one game a month challenge is a product of the 2013 Global Game Jam and won the award for Best Game Design.

Basically it’s a platformer in which the player needs to manage his heart rate by collecting keys in each level.

The game is still in development and we’ll probably add more level soon. Play it here: Beat My Heart

There are a few bugs in the game so sorry for that. Enjoy!

I’m joining up in this thing. I’m not much of a coder, so my games are all collaborations or very simple, but I get 1GAM xp for having a Ludum Dare profile – AND I really want to do CRAjam and support my friend David S Gallant, so I guess I’m on board. Hey everyone. I’m Robby.

Tags: #1GAM, CRAjam

Hi fellow Ludum Darers! Just thought I’d let you guys know about my post compo game called Spectra that’s just been released for Mac, PC, Linux and iPad. This game is a more polished and expanded version of my LD24 game EvoCube which managed 76th overall in that compo. The game got a positive response in the comp so I thought I might polish it up for commercial release and here it is. I’ve included some screenshots below from the new version. Check it out by going to http://albedogames.com/spectra

But, it’s February…I think I’m the last one across the finish line here, but the development journey was much more entertaining whilst taking the scenic route

So, yes Super Grid Run is the game and It officially got released on January the 31st, as the first entry to the onegameamonth.com challenge. It’s a fast paced avoider with fun retro graphics and I think I’ve reached the 1 dollar goal now, which is a great thing to achieve. It’s a very simple one-touch game and there is lots more details about it over at http://www.supergridrun.com/

The Ludum Dare Game Jams have been a great experience for me so far and I’m looking forward to the next one whenever it may be!

Best of luck to everyone who enters and has allready entered the one game a month challenge and I’ll be back next Ludum Dare.

Sneaky Promo Video and Google Play Links below:

Promo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7rvnwjvjbo

Free Demo: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Refresh_Creations_Ltd.Super_Grid_Run_Lite

Full Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Refresh_Creations_Ltd.Super_Grid_Run

LD47 was my first and hopefully not my last one. With my entry, I tried to capture the monotonous life of a villain. I’m fulltime Indie, made PyroPainter, an app that draws special effects into videos, now I’m focusing more and more on making games

In another lifetime, four Ludum Dares ago, I entered my very first game jam with a little platformer called “HUGMONSTER”

HUGMONSTER was a Unity web player game (yes, there was a time when I wasn’t making only Android titles!) It had a title screen, and ending, and six or seven levels. It also had art completely composed of typefaces.

Very soon, HUGMONSTER will have its official, world debut as a mobile game, specifically designed for tablets! It features:

• 20 Levels of puzzle platforming pandemonium!
• 5 Animated movie intermissions!
• An awesome soundtrack!
• A touchscreen-friendly UI!
• Art still mostly composed of typefaces!

Screenshot from device

And here’s a quick trailer

More details to come!

Tags: HUGMONSTER

Hello.

I don’t know if this was already a Jam idea, or if there are rules for it. But I thought it would be fun to kinda make a jam out of it, well for me it was fun. I heard about how some of the people waiting in line to see Indie game the movie for 4 hours decided to do a little game jam to pass the time. I had the idea to do kinda the same thing but at work. Now my job can be very uneventful at some times, so I made this game at work.

I call it Push the block. I am aiming for that creepy kinda feel with an emotional attachment to it. All you do in this game is push a block across this landscape.

I wanted to put in a proper back drop in it, but I might do it later. I will finish it for the CRA game jam going on right now, I may as well right?

P.S.

Do you want it to be a happy ending where it says, “You win!”, a sad ending where it says “You Lose!”, or a mystery?

I should have started a couple hours ago but was watching a movie instead. Oh well.

Anyways. Good luck to those participating!

Can’t wait to see what some of you come up with!

Tags: CRAjam

Today I released MidBoss (v0.5 beta), because stuff might still change and/or break) as a feature complete game. It’s an overhauled, rebalanced version of my LD25 game, and my January entry for One Game a Month.

MidBoss is a game about possessing your defeated enemies in order to become stronger. You play the weakest of the dungeon denizens, an imp with no ability other than possessing other creatures. Your goal is to defeat and possess increasingly stronger creatures, unlocking their abilities for yourself and becoming stronger as you go along, and eventually defeat and become the dungeon’s ultimate endboss.

Features now include:

• Possess your enemy and gain their strengths and skills
• Dynamic music system with more frenetic music to accompany action
• Line of sight and fog of war systems
• A total of 15 monsters to defeat and 10 skills to unlock
• Randomly generated dungeon floors
• Single-file save and resume
• Permanent death, if you die your save is gone (save-scumming is available)
• Full options menu including key rebinding

If you like it or have feedback, feel free to leave comments here or let me known on Twitter @enichan. Also in case anyone’s curious, here’s my 1GAM profile.

Tags: 2D, ld25, pygame, python, SuccessStory

The unique old school climate. Who spent days in games’ saloons knows what I am talking about

Program splits colour of the background, sprites into 3 RGB base colours plus noise, plus a horizontal line filter*

Then it randomly shifts it, in a random time intervals, it gives an illusion of glitches from old monitors

It  all gives an efffect of old, and ” kind-hearted” games that we have  played.

Download

The software has been produced in gamemaker 8.1 in a free time to be used in games.

You can download the filter pack from our website

team Something Beautiful

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2013 at 6:07 am and is filed under CRAJam. 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.

Not sure how many people are going to be entering this Jam, but I fear it will be even fewer than Mini-LD#39, so I am going to have to make sure I finish an entry for this. The subject matter is political in nature which is the kind of subject that I don’t like to touch so this may be very interesting. I am going with my first thought which is a tax auditor adventure game. While I would like to go with my GameJam libraries adventure game library, it is simply not far enough along so this will be created in Flash Professional the old-fashioned way. As no real rules have been given, I am going with the combo rules but with a looser deadline. As I have created a twitter account, I figure I might as well post updates to it ( https://twitter.com/BillySpelchan )

For those of you who are skipping this Jam to watch some type of big game, I will only point out that the Stanley Cup playoffs aren’t for a while yet!

Hello

I started making my first 3D game in Unity about 3 months ago and it is now (partially) complete. I created the models in Maya, the textures in Photoshop, and I recorded the in-game music on my.It was fun to make. It’s called RedGreenBlue and it’s about shooting ghosts with the right coloured pills (not bullets; ghosts react badly towards pills).

I am 15 years old and I stared learning programming a few years ago (I really enjoy it). The game will be available soon as a free download.

Here is video of what it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls2ySVIe6sI

Natanijel: Ba(NO3)2

Tags: 3D, first, javascript, shooter, unity

So After a month or so of pretty relaxed programming I’ve finally finished my first game. For me this is a big thing, I’ve finally stuck with an idea through good and bad and got a finished product. Basically I’d really appreciate it if some of you amazing people on this site could play and tell me what you think.  It’s uploaded here at staticvoidgames(This website is great)

SCREENSHOTS:

Tags: java, release, staticvoidgames

Since it’s a little vague as to when the deadline is, let’s try to address that.

Since a few of the entry’s started early, and a few people might start late, I think it’s only fair to allow for at least 2 days to work and on it and one day of polish. Since that’s pretty much what everyone else got. So, the proposed deadline is Wednesday!

I’ll leave the final word to Pov. But let’s use that as a guideline shall we?

Good luck to the remaining jammers everyone!

My entry for the CRAJam has been released. the entry page is http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/cra-jam/?action=preview&uid=15656 . The game has you playing an auditor who has to decide the fate of the people you audit. There are three different endings to the game based on your performance. I still have sound to add to the game so might slip in an update on monday or tuesday.

Tags: adventure, audit, cra, taxes

And that’s a wrap folks!

Honestly that’s the most fun I’ve had in a jam in a while. Even if I had a few problems and unforseen hiccups along the way. I was able to finish a jam game on time! (the universe must be getting ready to collapse in on itself, prepare your souls)

And to top it off, at least 11 (not counting myself) of you submitted a game! I only expected 1 or 2, not 11! Especially since, due to circumstances, the original jam starter guy couldn’t finish. But I’m surprised that we got so many games! This has really been a pleasure!

You may check out all the submissions here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/cra-jam/?action=preview

Submitters:

woneill

Lianne Booton

Spelchan

cmjd

dualryan

netgrind

Finnegan2100

Businessman

tony.pe

Sgt Squirrelly

DamianSommer

Myself: xhunterko

Special  Thanks to:

mikebithell

Pov

David S. Gallant

Don’t forget to play and rate the games! Careful, some might be NSFW! And don’t forget to help the guy who made the game that started this all out by buying it here: http://www.davidsgallant.com/igtced.html And don’t forget to vote yes on Greenlight here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116321868

Great jobs everyone and thank you again!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/cra-jam/?action=preview

I finally got around to posting my Ludum Dare 25 time-lapse, accompanied with some idle musings and some epic open (GPL3) music

Check it out!

http://youtu.be/90V72BQvPOo

A few notes in case you were wondering:

• OS is Fedora 17 with XFCE
• IDEs are Code::Blocks (for C++) and Netbeans (for Java)
• Blender for 3D modeling
• GIMP for sprites and for texturing
• the scrot command-line program was used to capture images periodically:

function capture
{
  local name=$(date +%s).png
  scrot $name
  echo $name
}
while (true)
do
  capture;
  sleep 10
done

• ffmpeg was used to compile these images into a video:

n=0
for old in *.png; do
  new=$(printf “%06d.png” ${n})
  mv ${old} ${new}
  let n=n+1
done
ffmpeg -b 1800 -r 30 -i %06d.png -vcodec libx264 -crf 0 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -threads 0 out.mkv

• Audacity was used to capture and clean the audio
• OpenShot was used to edit and to compile the final video

Tags: blender, code::blocks, ffmpeg, GIMP, montpellier, netbeans, screen capture, scrot, timelapse, xfce

Finished writing my postmortem for the CRA Agent game that I created for the CRAJam. The full text of the postmortem is located at http://blazinggames.blogspot.com/2013/02/cra-agent-postmortem.html . For those who don’t want to read the full text, here is a quick summary:

What went right:

– Having a clear and realistic vision of the game I wanted to develop.

– Multiple endings.

What went wrong:

– Politics. Though CRA kind of requires that.

– Having unique art for 10 characters.

Had fun with the jam despite how few people participated. Still haven’t decided if this will be my 1GAM entry for this month.

Tags: postmortem

It’s still a post-compo version, no matter how late it arrives!

I participated in my first Ludum Dare almost a year ago, for #23 “Tiny World” and made Humphrey’s Tiny Adventure. It was my first game jam and I had a great time, but the game I made had a long ways to go — despite being technically “complete” it didn’t have any audio and a lot of things were unclear due to the fact that I hadn’t done any testing for feedback before I released.

I recently decided to revisit the project for OneGameAMonth, and the result is Humphrey’s Tiny Adventure: Remastered.

So…yeah. That’s all I’ve got to say. Go play it!

Hello people of the blagosphere, I have this website on to which I shall probably put my games what I make, and probably some thoughts on game design and coding should I have any of note. I started it about a year ago but it quickly failed as my co-conspirator walked away. But yet, here I am, back to put some more games up there.

As for the quality of these games: Expect very little. I’m not really putting myself under any obligation to make games here, so it will just be whatever ideas capture my fancy. Also the art will be forever bad unless I can find someone to do it for me, which is unlikely since pretty much everything I post on there will be free and open source. No cash incentive, you see.

With that said, thanks for listening to my nigh-incoherent rambling.

Tags: game, gamedev, games, gaming, indie, pygame, python, website

I want to ask you on your experiences and opinions on a problem I recently experienced:

       Games              +                Money            =                War!

About 3 weeks ago, I made with 2 other guys a game for Global Game Jam. The work was flawless and we had a lot of fun. We were very proud of the first prototype and decided to sell an improved and extended version.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But it isn’t. The guy, who is sort of the team master, offered me 5%  and our graphics designer 20%.
This is in fact ridiculous. I created the sounds of the game, translated the game to English and did take a major part in Game Design. Also our graphics designer would be under-payed.

Currently I’m trying to team up with him to get more money – 50% for the coder and team master, 30% for the graphics designer and 20% for me would be fair.

Did you experience similar problems? Have you any suggestion how to deal with them?

EDIT: Things have mostly cleared. Thank you all for you answers.
Also keep in mind, that this post only reflects my point of view.

The running game I made for the mini LD 39 is now out on iOS (for free), after long week of “in review”, and because Apple don’t like that my graphics looks like pacman ^^”

So, the web and android version looks like that :

and the iOS version is like that :

Have fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 at 5:38 am and is filed under MiniLD #39. 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.

After realizing what we felt was a serious shortcoming on the South African Indie Games scene, we created Indie Games SA. So if you’re from South-Africa and are interested in Indie Dev (Of course you are, what am I saying?) then hop onto the site!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTAPrg4CArM

I’ve decided to try to make my first video game this week, and I’ve given myself the restriction of five days to complete this project. The usual thing to do is to have 48 hours like the Ludum Dare, but since this is my first game I don’t want to rush or lose any sleep over it. The goal is to make a short 2d platformer about a boy who falls into a well, and has to try to find his way out. The reasoning behind the well is so that the game takes place in a cave setting, meaning less art will be needed. Due to my lack of creativity, the game is named “The Well”. The engine will be done in from scratch in Java, as that’s what I have the most experience with. I tried to learn to use some libraries like Slick2d, but it took too much time, so I’ve decided to just stick to what I know.

Today, I’ve managed to get some of the foundation code set up. So far, the game loads a map and tilesheet (text files) and places a character for the player. So far, the player can move around, and collide with the walls of the level while the camera follows him around. I’ve decided to have three layers, a background layer, a collision layer, and a foreground layer. The reason there are three separate layers is to make the map editing more flexible, as there doesn’t need to be code for each type of tile possible. Another benefit of having separate layers is that each tile doesn’t have to be completely square. The collision layer and the foreground layer can have transparency without leaving holes in the level.

So far in terms of art, I am just using placeholder black and white tiles to show the background and the walls, but these will be replaced with proper tiles once I am done with them. I’ve also drawn a main character, but it is still a rough draft. For this project, the coding will probably be done first, with the art, music and level design done after all the main mechanics are in place.

The biggest challenge today was trying to structure my code. I spent so much time worrying about how object oriented the code is, and trying to make the engine really flexible. I realise now that it was premature optimisation that really isn’t needed for such a small project, so from now I am going to try to code quicker and just get as much content as I can done. Tomorrow I want to try to get done the coding for animations, some tight movement for the character, and a menu and options interface.

I’ll be making a blog post and video each day showing my progress and explaining a bit of my thought process behind my decisions. Overall, I think this project will be really helpful in terms of learning as I’ll have to use so many skills in such a condensed time frame. I am mainly a programmer, so naturally the coding is the most important part of the project to me, however making the entire game myself will force me to broaden my creativity. I’ll have to do all the drawing and music myself, and since I have very little experience in this I could really learn a lot from it. Another thing is that I am a terrible writer, I have always been terrible at English, so forcing myself to make these blog posts will hopefully help me work on that.

Check out my website for updates: http://custardgames.com/

Tags: 2d platformer, day 1, devlog, dominic mortlock, java, mortl8324, part 1, the well

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I think it’s pretty exciting that the world did not end this December, because if the world had ended, there wouldn’t be any more Ludum Dares. In honor of the continued existence of the world, the theme for this Mini-LD will be:

The challenge this time around shall be to think outside of the computational box and to somehow put the real world into your game. This could take plenty of forms (I mean, there’s quite a lot of material in the real world – some of it has to be usable in a game) and is, as always, completely up to interpretation, although I would strongly encourage people to explicitly state what part of their game is from the real world.

A few fairly straightforward ways one might accomplish putting the real world into one’s game would be to create assets in the real world (like the beautiful drawing you see above), to base your game on some input method other than the usual keyboard+mouse, to use real data in your game, or to turn some specific phenomenon from the real world into a game. Or of course, one always has more options than that for incorporating the real world – the only limit is your imagination. Remember that the important thing isn’t to have undeniable evidence that your game is based on the real world, but to have an idea that came to you after thinking about things that aren’t computers.

The Jam will run from February 22nd to the 25th. Until then, keep an eye out for inspiration. After then, do something and submit it.

EDIT: Submission will end at (or at least no sooner than) 11:00 PM EST, which I think is typical of Ludum Dare. Feel free to start whenever you want on February 22nd.

Hello developers of the ludum dare community! I am XHH and I like to make games. I’ve made about two so far. My friends and a handful of other gamers played them. They liked them. And that was that. But now I have finally stumbled upon this site for competitions and I am excited to start showing you my creativity. Actually, I don’t even know if I’m supposed to post this. I guess that will be the first part of my road to being a great indie game dev!

Here is my site. I update it whenever I make some progress on a game.

XHH

Thanks for reading. I can’t wait to enter a competition. I’m just so excited to see where I go with this!

It’s a little late, since Valentine’s day is almost over. But I had just a few hours to create this little game, so I’m very happy I finished it before the day is over.  The game just continues on without levels or score, so it’s like an interactive postcard.

I plan to submit this or an improved version to “one game a month”.  I have set a personal goal to create a number of games, taking only about 1 day for each game.

You can find the game here:

http://tmtg.net/apps/valentine/

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 at 1:47 pm and is filed under LD - Misc. 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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eP3_gPoB70&feature=youtu.be

Progress! It is actually starting to come together to form a real game now on day 3. The main features added today were checkpoints, death, water, and some new art. Firstly I just wanted to mention that I now have somebody working with me on the project. Someone who read one of my posts about the game messaged me and asked if he could help me with the graphics. Since I am terrible at it, I’ve let him take over the sprite design front.

Now that I have art to use instead of my black and white placeholder images, the level actually looks like a proper level now. Not only does it look like a real game, but it is starting to have an objective to it. I added in blocks that can kill you now, so these will be things like spikes or lava, and if you touch them you are killed. Luckily, I also implemented checkpoints, so after dying you get respawned at your last selected checkpoint. The checkpoints come in the form of candles. If you walk up to a candle and press x, your character will light it and it will activate that checkpoint. The last thing I added was water, just because it was easy and added some variety to the level. When your character is in water, he is basically just slowed down, so he doesn’t move as fast or jump as high.

Today felt really productive because of all the foundation code I had set up in the previous day. It is now easy for me to add all kinds of new blocks with their own functions to the game. I’ve also managed to get this system integrated with the map editor I am using so that none of the levels have to be hard coded, but can all come from file. This results in much more flexible development, and allows the artist to test his art without needing to edit the source code at all.

In order to let the artist and testers play the game, I had to export the game in a runnable jar. This proved to be more difficult than I initially thought because of the way files are handled. The way a jar gets images and files is different to the way I was using before which took me ages to figure out, but now I know better for future projects.

A challenge I had today is that I spent ages trying to figure out a bug I am having with my character’s jumping. For some reason there is a combination of keys you can press you give your character a larger jump than usual. This is something I will have to fix tomorrow as I haven’t entirely ironed out this problem. Tomorrow, I want to work on a menu interface and/or implementing sounds into the game.

For updates and other posts, check my website: http://custardgames.com/

Tags: day 3, mortl8324, part 3, the well

I was so busy grading other games I forgot about mine! Well, here goes.

My game, LightYearsAway, got 4th overall and 4th in fun as-well. Those are the two categories most important to me. I’m happy with that! I really am! Most of the comments I got were good constructive criticisms.

I agree, the pop-up message did look bad and in hindsight I should have changed that to the tip animation. The best criticism I got was making the look of the spaceships relate to movement and make them look different rather than pallet swaps!

That was my first game jam and I’m happy with the result!

Hey all, Ive been thinking for sometime I want to switch from Unity for 2d based games.

Ive used Unity for 2 LD’s and I used XNA prior to that and what I found was that while Unity is perfectly capable and in some cases awesome for 2d it feels like im fighting with the engine to craft my game.

Ive done a little research into 2d javascript game engines and decided this is the way I want to go.

Crafty, Melon and Impact pop up quite a lot and of course there’s Construct2 but I think I would prefer more code control. I would also prefer open source, some of the above being licensed.

I would love to here your recommendations for a 2d javascript game engine

It’s a lot later than most, and nobody requested it, but here it is anyway. I already wrote some stuff about it so just read it over here: http://www.lethalware.co.uk/2013/02/invasion-revamp-released.html

For LD25, I tried using Unity for the first time. Well, that’s not quite true–I had tried using it a few times before, but never got anything done. As a programmer, the seemingly content-oriented interface threw me off, so before LD25 I read a lot of documentation to ensure I knew what Unity is all about.

Where’s the code?

So, what did I learn about Unity while making my game, Entropic? Quite a bit, but in summary: Unity is awesome, it handles its component engine well, and I look forward to using it again in the future.

I made a few odd design choices near the beginning that I’d like to share, since the rest of the LD was the usual “started off well, hit a major issue in the middle, almost jumped ship, but came around in the end and finished it off.”

Entropic is, at its roots, a space sim, and in science fiction space ships tend to have gravity independent of ship acceleration. If a starship starts spinning, actors typically just stumble around a bit.

How is this accomplished in a constrained physics engine like Unity’s while retaining physics-powered movement both inside and outside the ship? One way would be to have multiple physics worlds (aka spaces), one simulating the exterior and the other the interior–but Unity only allows one world to exist. The next best thing are physics layers, which can be configured to only allow interaction between objects in the ship and objects outside the ship. Simple enough, and Unity makes this easy to configure.

I then (too eagerly, in hindsight) decided to add scale into the problem. Ships move at much greater speeds and have much larger sizes than humans within a ship, so I thought it would be a good idea to scale down the “space” world to account for potential accuracy issues. Easy enough, especially in Unity–just turn down the scale on all the “ship exterior” and “asteroid” meshes, and it’s done.

It does look really weird, though. (I hid some of the ship bridge’s walls to get this screenshot of both layers combined.)

One problem that I had early on is that there was very little visibility on the bridge. On the Enterprise, that little screen was enough because they could tell is to look at anything around the ship–with an equally-sized window on a ship, it’s surprisingly hard to tell what’s going on.

High visibility. The player can actually see “out” of the bridge at almost any direction.

To make the field of view much higher, I decided to apply an idea I had been holding onto for a while. By playing with the depth buffer a bit, I made some surfaces that hide the parts of the ship behind it. This dramatically improves visibility, and is also cool since it creates the effect of having an “impossible geometry.” (My explanation is that the ship is covered with tiny cameras that capture the state of the ship’s exterior, then display on interior screen-panels what the system extrapolates you would see from that point.)

It’s bigger on the inside.

With some more advanced ship designs, I think that could get really cool, really quick. (Battle bridge, anyone?)

One thing that made this effect much weaker is the cloudy effect I had to use to represent the volume of the ship. They look somewhat like stars, and it is a little weird that they form a box around the ship. This is meant to represent the volume of your craft, since you don’t have any other reference with the fancy windows active. Need to find a few artists for the next time I do something like this, so it doesn’t confuse.

Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out, although as a game the project was sorely lacking. For the next LD I’ll avoid ideas that need fancy but non-value-adding programming. I hope. It’s hard to resist a challenge.

Hello!
I have put my procedural music generator online for anyone to try it out

I hope that this will be a legit LD48 tool and that you’ll find it useful!

I’m happy to present Cells, my first game.

You have to survive viruses attacks by collecting food and generating defense cells. Will you be smart enough to reach the last level?

I’ll be entering this mini ludum dare and will be using h3d/h2d to make an Earth-themed game using Haxe… I’ll probably be starting on Thursday or Friday.

Tags: bring it, h2d, h3d, haXe

yay!  I’m the first on mini#40: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-40/?action=preview&uid=10313

Its a joint effort – already got lots of help from the LD IRC channel! – so do head over and help code/art/sound/gameplay/concept etc! 😀

It happens that I’m very interested in procedurally generated content.

I’m currently gathering free content generators, I can use with my current project Kelgar and future projects.

I want to share this list with you: http://kelgardev.forumieren.org/h2-tools
May it help developing your projects 😀

Also, feel free to suggest other content generators. I will add only ones to the list which work for me, though, that means they either need to run in browser or under Linux.

It’s time for the mini dare and I’m barely prepared.

First of all the cooling system in my laptop died so I had to bring it in for repair this morning. Thankfully I am in a technological based family of nerds so we just busted out a spare laptop. It is surprisingly powerful, I just finished installing eclipse and also downloaded OBS so I can stream my progress.

I’m not that good at making games yet and the time I have just hinders the process, but I have an idea of what I want to do and hope…lots and lots of hope.

I also hope you all have a fantastic weekend and a good Ludum Dare!

http://www.twitch.tv/skyllartor

So my entry for mini LD 40 is a different kind of bus simulator. A bus themed puzzle game.
I was on the bus a few days ago when I was watching the common system where people fill up each seat pair with a single person until every seat pair holds one person then have to start doubling up.
I was thinking about how it’s similar to electrons filling up energy levels in atoms when I started thinking about how certain people however went against the norm. I.E. the stereotypical crazy person who loves to sit next to other people, or intimidating people who nobody wants to sit within a 2/3 seat radius of.
Thinking of this made me realise that this was a good idea for a real life themed game for the mini ludum dare.

So this is what the game is. You are given a bus configuration (potentially different for every level) along with an assortment of people. You need to fit them into the seats to maximize happiness. British people hate sitting near other people. Crazy people don’t mind sitting near others, but exude an aura of extra unhappyness to those next to them (except other crazy people, since they don’t mind.) Unpleasant people will destroy the happyness of people around them in all directions.

Update:

Progress is going well. Placing people in the bus works fine, it tracks the unhappiness produced by different people, which varies based on who they are (british, chav or crazy right now.) It also displays the goal to reach for a given level however this isn’t really used in anyway.

Also the game has some music that plays on a loop.

Screenshot:

The british are blue, the crazy people are green and the people everyone wants to avoid are in red. Placeholder art at the moment.

I had a different idea before, but it was too difficult to finish in time so I made up a new one.

I thought about using real time in the game. Then I remembered replay games, where you replay the level with a new character, and other characters repeat actions you did previous times, like Chronotron. But the player automatically switches each hour. So you have to time your actions. You can, for example, press a button, close the game, open it 30 minutes later and press another button.

It’s very hard to test, I have to change my system time constantly. I won’t be able to work on it tomorrow, so I guess it’ll be tough to finish it. I think I’ll keep updating it after the MiniLD release.

Well, I forgot to actually do my homework before today (and still haven’t done it. Solution: I will stay up until I’m too tired to program, then I will do my other work!). So, from this, I have two sources of inspiration from the real world: Snow and homework. Now, one of those things is fun, so I’m going to make a game about it. I noticed yesterday when I was outside that snow is pretty interesting. Namely, if you’re trying to move from point A to point B, the fact that the snow I was on was icy and tended either not to support my weight (which made me slow and annoyed) or be slippery (which made me lose my balance). Yesterday, the snow was kind of annoying, but it’s not always that way – it’s fun to slide down slopes and to build stuff in the snow, so I’m going to make sure I get stuff like that in. I’m thinking that I should make a survival-ish game (except I want to encourage movement because that’s where snow becomes important).

(And if I’m really on top of things, I think it’d be awesome to make it so that if there’s a high ledge or chasm your want to reach, you could build a slide with a jump and get to the other side)

So i decided to join the MiniLD with my friends. Due to technical difficulties 10+ hours where lost in development :S. But we will get through it! 😀

Tags: Alx101, Echoes Entertainment, Fatass, first, MiniLD 40

 Showing something… Trying to save the world or something. End World Revenge!

My first LD! Well, it’s not a full one, but still a LD none the less.

I had much trouble coming up with an idea. Eventually I settled on circumnavigating the globe “Around the World in 80 Days” style.

I have no idea where this game will go, or if I will even be able to complete it, but I figured I should at least try.

For base code I will be using a very basic rendering library I wrote a few weeks back. It’s very, very simple, but it should help.

Sorry guys, but I just realized there is no way I will be able to finish this. I have way too much homework and far to little experience. I wish you all luck though!

Hello fellows LDers.

Though I’m not taking part of MiniLD #40 (just started a new project a while ago, now I don’t want to put it on hold… =X), I want to share my latest game (my really late janurary entry for #OneGameAMonth):

Click here to play it on kongregate.

This game is somewhat based on my first Ludum Dare (LD #22 – Loneliness). The same main gameplay aspect is used: you must bring colors back to the world. But this time it’s a platformer, and as you get more coins (and thus more colors) platforms appears. Considering that the former was my first game ever (kinda xD), this one is way better. And I learned how polish makes a game better (though it’s quite tiring… >_<).

I also uploaded it to MochiMedia, so I hope it gets to many other flash portals. xD

Give it a try! (it’s short)

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 at 12:01 pm and is filed under MiniLD #40. 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.

Hey all

My game is coming together really well!

Just as I dream’t it to be haha.

I’ve added where you dream of what task you have to do for the level and then it plays a movie of it.

Then I’ve added points and doors and beds.

I am keeping the music for the game!

I hope you enjoy playing it when it is released on Monday!

However it will only be available for Windows!

Hope you are all programming hard!

SpokenBluntly22

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 at 1:18 pm and is filed under MiniLD #40. 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.

Yay! First Ludum dare ever!

As i saw the MiniLD on the homepage of LudumDare i immediately became excited. I have wanted to do an LD but never really had the time or knowledge, but now i can finally be part of it. So what will i do?

When i annonced the MiniLD to my friends whom i was going to work with the big questionmark came up for what game we should make. We discussed the theme and ideas for it for about 2 hours when we finally came up with a very interesting concept, freerunning. As i love doing freerunning (yes the sport) i immediately came to think about that when i read the theme. However this will not be any “standard” freerunning game, oh no! Just a week ago me and my friends where talking on ooVoo and discussed games, when we came up with the “fat person simulator”, The idea made us all crack up, and since we where going to create a game this weekend we thought “hey why not”. So the game we are doing is a freerunnign fatty game, where you as the player is supposed to get thin (don’t we all). Now your way of getting thin is freerunning and healthy food, however healthy food is disgusting, as we all know. So a multiple level, platformer runnign game is what we are going to do, with a timer for game limitation and different kinds of food for points.

As i am the programmer most of the gameplay is up to me to create, and since i have worked with C++ for almost 4 years i went with the SFML 1.6 library and C++ as language.

Will be back with updates/screenshots of the progress as i go! And also i may even livestream some on twitch.

Just starting on my Mini-LD#40 game. I have chosen Human DNA to be the real-world aspect to my game. I am taking a chunk of real DNA data which will be used in the game. The game is simple enough that I should have no problems finishing. I hope to have an alpha to post later this afternoon and the beta this evening.  Sunday will be fine-tuning. Progress reports will be done on Twitter if anybody cares.

Tools: Flash Professional, Audacity (+ Dreamweaver for web page).

May port to HTML5 in which case I will be using the CreateJS library.

Good luck to everyone else entering this mini. Lets hope there are more than a dozen this time.

This Mini Ludum Dare #40 was my first Ludum Dare and my first Competition.  I loved that experience and I will repeat this as soon as possible.

It was a “McGyver” game : I had not much time, not much ressources, and I don’t speak English daily. But daily I play games, I make games and I think games.

My game is weird, and hardly playable (like my other games haha), but that was fun to create it.  In french we say “jouer le jeu” (“play the game”)  when there is nobody to control if you respect the rules. This is one of the foundations of my game.

The main challenge was to  transpose game rules (reward, death) in real life.

Say hello to  Survive in real world !

Apparently, it takes some effort to make a physics engine that mimics some of the nuances of the real world. Namely, the whole thing with making surfaces act like they’re slippery is somewhat challenging to do seamlessly. I think I’ve got the physics down now, but my game is basically a diagonal line (above which is the color #FFFFFF and below which is #00FFFF) which has very little friction and a little player (who I call “black box” on account of him being a black rectangle) who falls down it. My game, now, could be aptly titled “ULTIMATE SLIDING SIMULATOR”, but I think I’ll be a little more ambitious than that.

(I’ve also made a neat data structure so I can generate the world in whatever chunks I wanna and can make the world arbitrarily large. That’s not nearly as exciting though. It’s got a few bugs, but they’re of the nature “If the player attains a sufficiently high velocity, the world around them will generate 1 frame too late and they’ll either crash the game or pass through a solid surface”

So I started yesterday with my remake of space invaders. The real world aspect is that you have to save the world, and if you don’t 2012 happens and the aliens invade and kill off humanity. At the moment I have some sprites going, and I just finished one of my largest animation endeavors, five minutes ago. I mean this thing was just pissing the hell out of me and now that I finally did it, I’m happy as a gold miner that just struck gold! Well I’m almost done, and its nothing fancy, but by tomorrow, I will have finished my first Ludum Dare and I’m pretty happy about that.

Just some of the sprites I have set up (I did not make these, they are royalty free sprites made by someone else who will receive credit in my game)

Just one of the sprites I’m using

Good luck Everyone!

Finally fixed the collision! And now we have a cool menu and level selection! Still need to add more levels and add powerups, but soon it will be finished!

Me with several pals

The current player is green, and others are blue. They can run around and push buttons. The system works quiet well but inaccurate. I made some level design. I haven’t made any graphics though.

Hello all!

You peeps remember LD #24 with the theme ‘evolution’?

Of course you do!

Well after much time of working on my entry post compo, I put the game live on Kongregate.com!

I’d love it if you could give it a play, and give it a rate! I wouldn’t consider the game to be 100% done, as I plan to keep updating it.

Think of it as kind of a beta test for when I make a mobile version; this way, I can release it with minimal flaws!

Thanks,

Tj

Hey everyone

I could only make a demo version of my game (Not complete it) because of the time restriction and homework

but I cannot seem to be able to submit it!

I sign in and can post this blog

But when I try to click submit here it says that i must be signed in to submit it!

If anyone help me please comment!

Should my cookies be set to something specific?

please  help!

I’m new to this!

Thanks

SpokenBluntly22

Tags: done, help, mini ld, sign in

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2013 at 4:26 pm and is filed under MiniLD #40. 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 finished my entry for Mini-LD#40. The entry page is http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-40/?action=preview&uid=15656 but for some reason it doesn’t appear to show up on the list of entries. I am assuming it is simply some type of delay issue and will check later. The game is called DNA and you have to assemble matching DNA sequences to the ones that are shown. For the real-world component of the game I am using real human DNA data for both the sequences that have to be matched and for the title music.

So I just finished my game and uploaded it. This is the first time I upload an applet to a website and you cannot believe the trouble I was put through. Anywho, when I finally uploaded it, it took sooooo long to load, but I was proud, and now its up. Go check it out everyone, I’m super happy to have finished my first LD, even though I only got a few hours of sleep.

So the deadline is closing in. Level system working, character movement optimal, coins placed randomly and in sane positions, compiled for linux and ready to go! Now there is just some more level editing and to compile it for windows and we are good to go! Hopefully will release it a couple of hours before deadline!

Tags: Alx101, Echoes, Fatrunning, Zeike

I’ve been crashing and burning hard on my goal to create 25 games this year (made plenty of prototypes on schedule but always seem to run out of steam when it’s time to make the game look like more than a bunch of colored rectangles), so I hoped that Mini LD#40’s smaller time limit might help me with Game #4. I’m calling it Hell Terror Cave of Darkness.

You play as a guy who fell in a dark cave and have to escape by moving and jumping, but the cave is filled with ghosts and monsters. You die if you come into too much contact with either one. The only way to kill/repel ghosts is to turn on your flashlight–which will be controlled via webcam input! (Monsters will avoid you in the dark but are agitated by light and will attack.) Controls are WASD and a light source, or a light source and arrow keys depending on your handedness. A lamp, an iPhone, a bike light, anything will do. (Alternately, if you’re playing in a bright room, you could shade the camera with your hand to control the darkness.) Is it unwieldy? Probably, but it gives me an excuse to learn about coding with webcams! I’ve learned something every time I tackle a weird, ambitious prototype.

I wrote some code using Pygame and VideoCapture that detects light concentrated into the center of the camera using a brightness formula, and built a game world that lights up and darkens accordingly. My problem is that the webcam operations and character movement don’t mesh well–the game grinds to an unplayable standstill whenever the webcam is running, regardless of whether or not the video is actually displayed on screen, regardless of the rate at which brightness is calculated from the webcam, and regardless of the amount of player input.

I’ve tried adjusting the number of pixels analyzed, the frequency of the analysis, etc., but this problem is really stumping me. I can’t figure out if my crappy notebook PC is part of the problem, and I’m not sure how to tell the webcam to run in a more conservative manner.

I’ve made a good run at this Mini LD, but time is running out fast and I might have to abandon ship if I can’t sort this problem out soon.

The title pretty much says it all. I’m very excited about this, more so than I can convey in a post like this!

I finished up Mr Wizard for my January #1GAM game, releasing with 3 difficulty levels and an endless mode. Please, check it out here: http://www.indievania.com/games/mr-wizard-vs-world

It’s pay-what-you-want ($1 minimum). If you can’t afford it, or just aren’t interested in that type of game, please just spread the word! I’d really appreciate anything: tweets, reviews, complaints, anything.

Thank you for taking time to read this. Long live the Ludum Dare community!

Tags: #1GAM, mr wizard, SuccessStory

my 2nd game this year! Super Hero Time finished today!!…

saving the world from catasthrope, beating baddies is everyday life of heroes, enjoy it in this short six stages minigame with absurd art and catchy music by Matt McFarland

Play on Kongregate

this time, I create about six different minigame and turn it into one game. I said minigame, because the simple mechanic it have for every stages. and I’m trying different art now, compared to my last game this has so much color. and for music, I’m using music from http://www.mattmcfarland.com/ titled Strangled, you can hear it here

I hope this game will be better recieved by audience than my previous game, because I too learn much from this game

hope you enjoy!

Tags: #1GAM, OneGameAMonth

Once again I missed out on the mini dare >:|. I was exited and ready and at the last minute life stopped me and told me “Nope!”. So to make up for my failure I shall make a game in 72 hours(does not follow the theme of the jam last weekend). If you would like to watch me I’ll be streaming here. Keep in mind that I started at 11 this morning(it is now 1:15). Just stop by and say Hi or stay and talk a while. Also no back seat programming unless I ask for help. Thank you!

Don’t you sometimes get enough of that?

PLAY :: RATE

No? Well I do. That’s why I decided to show how much I detest watching news and hearing about the world sometimes. Ok, most of the time.

The game was developed for the MiniLD#40 competition, themed: The Real World.

What the hell is this about?

Avoid the world is about defending yourself against media information (or misinformation). You fight with your only weapon while watching TV: your remote control.

Your goal is to push away all the words that the TV screen vomits upon you. If they reach you, your brain damage will increment, and when 100%, you lose. Note that you can’t win against the TV, you will always lose at the end.

Can I get Brain Damage playing this?

Good question. Yes you do, so please play carefully.

Where are the words coming from anyway?

The words are automatically read online using advanced alien technology, found in a cave by honorable scientist Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. In the modern world, this is know as RSS, a format which most newspapers have.

Did you find any trouble while doing this?

I’m glad you asked. Well probably you can’t imagine, but this was rather hard to make. Read the full post-mortem in my blog, I dare you! I DOUBLE DARE YOU!!

Tags: as3, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

Thanks Ludum Dare and 1GAM, for encouraging me to put out more games … even if they are shamefully dull and unplayable. 😉 I had been working on a game about operating an underwater base but it was taking me too long to figure out what the game is actually about. I mean, okay, yes, it’s about an underwater base, but the game I want to make which is part economic sim and part micromanaging the staff was again reaching beyond my February grasp. Instead I cranked out a quick idea I had about manipulating Conway’s Game of Life.  The game, Death to Conway, is a turn-based simulation of the Game of Life, and you’re given an opportunity to kill an extra cell in between generations. Excitement? Thrills? Who needs em! We’ve got cells, lots of terrible cells, and they must all be killed!

Play Now (in browser)

This was another HaxePunk joint. HaxePunk is sort of in flux now as the developer is making some additional changes to better support hardware acceleration on native targets, so I rolled back to HaxePunk 1.72a to build this one.

I don’t know why I have to code everything twice. I think it’s a failure to personally commit to my own requirements. I knew I wanted to have the ability to run the simulation separate from the display, but since I didn’t commit to it at the start, I  tightly coupled the simulation with the rendering system. Then of course I get the game working and realize no one is going to have an idea if they did well or not. The game showed you how many turns you took, but this doesn’t factor in how hard the level is. So then I decoupled the simulation from the rendering. Now I can quietly put it through 50 generations or so to determine how long it runs before it becomes stable, and then use this number of steps and number of remaining  live cells to come up with some estimated “par” value for the player to play against. If I had simply committed to adding this feature in at the start, I could have saved myself some rework.

Tags: #1GAM, haXe, haxepunk, nme, OneGameAMonth

Hello folks, today i’ll post a beginning project that I’m working in this last month. They’ll call SELECT S.A., and will be a mix of Missile Command… with reverse screen.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good definition.

The project born in the Ludum Dare with the theme “You are the villain”, and after the event i started the planning, script, test and everything else. In this month I start to code it in AS3 (same code that I used in the LD) and i’m thinking about make this game in Unity because he doen’t work fluently in old android phone.

Alright, that’s not a excuse if the game needs power of processing… but the fact is: the game doesn’t need too many power.

I just think to make this changes after i see the game Gunslugs work very smoothly in my smartphone (an Xperia X10 from 2009). If they make all of the game so nicelly, I have to make some at least similar in my game too, but the fact is: it will be a spend of time. So, I’ll finish this one in as3, and the next ones in UNity or other mobile languages.

Here i’ll let some images of the game until now.

Short Description of the Game

In the game you control a starship controlled for a company called Select.S.A, a demolition company who’s have one of your top client the governament of the galaxies. This starship use a drill to destroy the planets, but ocassionally they have problems with protestants and guerrillas. For that, they use special weapons projected to pull back the people who’s against the project.

Your principal weapon is a lacrimogen gas bomb, who’s send the protestants back to the planets:

Protestant hitted running off and another travelling

The protestants fly of the planet to attack a part of the starship. This attack causes a glitch in the starship and the drill back a little in every protestant attack, retarding the demolition process. When some of them hit the starship, it’s game over.

The three basic points that the protestants can attack

To win, the player has to make the drill hit the planet, and hold on a little to destroy the planet.

The game has galaxies, and every galaxy have the worlds to demolish. Every world is a level. The game also shows a cinematic history.

Some more concept imagesand draws

Tags: android, drillizer, fire hurricane, iOS, missile command, mobile gamne, select s.a., starling

Hey guys. You probably see why we don’t do rating during MiniLD’s now (just not enough turn-out). Looking at the logs, the most ratings any one game has is 8, then 5, 4, down to 0. Should I go ahead and close the MiniLD without rating? There’s really not enough data to give any fair comparison.

Hey all,

While we’re all waiting for the next Ludum Dare… Dan Dias will be hosting a CraftStudio-centered game jam on March 22-25 (72h, in team or solo)

Info, sign up and theme voting here:

http://thecreativeoutlet.com/jam1/

For those who haven’t heard of it: CraftStudio is a project of mine, it’s a real-time cooperative game-making platform based around 3D boxes and pixel art (it costs 15 € during the alpha, runs on Windows & Mac with Linux coming soon). I’m furiously working on the beta version but the latest alpha works very well already

I used it with a bunch of friends for the last 2 LDs, we made Porté par le Vent (ranked 4th overall FWIW) and Beach, please! (ranked #7 in Fun).

Tags: craftstudio, jam

It’s just a test post