Well, as I’ve been working on it throughout the week, I’ve been putting a lot more effort into it, and it’s been going way past the original 48hr game concept, hehe.
As such, I thought I’d post up a post-mortem on what went wrong in the 48 hours, and what went right.

The Good.

The theme was great. I love sandbox style games, be it sandbox in a “giant world to do as you please” sense, or even in a “here’s a puzzle, figure it out as you like” sense – as Little Quirks was to be. So that got the creative juices flowing, so to speak!

My concept was very simple – basically a Lemmings clone where they can crawl up and along walls and ceilings. The art was nice and simple too, fitting with the cute aesthetics as well.

The engine was in better shape than last time, after being used in another couple of projects since LD11 ( Plight of The Weedunks being one of the most well known – yes, this is basically the same engine, minus the 3D layer! ) and I got something up and running very quickly, and only took an hour to upgrade the engine to do dynamic colour replacement.

The Bad.

Hard drive hiccup. That wasn’t fun, especially seeing as I’ve just recently replaced one of them. Losing several hours of work is a killer, and more so when you’re in the middle of an SVN commit to an external server to try and avoid losing too much. Moral of the story, save and commit often!

Sound. Or lack thereof. I actually factored no time in for sound. This may have went against me if I had actually finished within the time limit. Something to be wary of for LD15; making time for everything is quite tough, but then that’s half the challange of Ludum Dare!

The Ugly.

Tilechecks are quick, and for the most part work very well. However, when there’s a lot of logic behind what your entities are doing (crawling around any side of a tile), those tilechecks quickly spiral out of control. I really should have been doing pixel checking with a hotspot being at the bottom of the sprite. Then again, I was able to get a ludicrous amount of them squirming around, with a full Lua-based state machine for each of them which a more expensive pixel check routine may not have allowed. A puzzle for sure as to what would’ve been better 😉

What Next?

It’s become apparant that there’s actually a bit of depth in this concept while I’ve been continuing it after work, and it’s been slowly going beyond just a 48hr game. I’ve decided to continue working on it on the run up to LD15, as it’ll let me see what my engine still requires, and fix some of the hideous bugs I’ve uncovered along the way.

I’ll still be releasing the game – source and all – when it’s done, and probably post it up here complete with final tag … more than likely 48 days after MiniLD11 rather than 48 hours 😉
The game was also designed for handhelds ( GP2X, Wiz, and Dingoo in particular – click for image – ) so you’ll probably see it on one of the sites for those hand helds when it’s done too

Tags: little quirks, post-mortem

Hey Ludum Darers!

Just a quick heads up: If you can’t contain your anticipation of this month’s coming LD, there are two opportunities to vent this weekend!

First up, RPGDX are holding a 48 hour contest, with the theme “Sidescrolling Mini-RPG“. It’s not a sub genre you see a lot of, so there’s bound to be lots of room to explore it! A few of you might remember the LoFi RPG contest earlier in the year, which went down quite well The rules are loose, and attempting to make an RPG in that kinda timeframe is a pretty interesting experience, to say the least. More information here!

Also, if you happen to have two hours free at midnight on saturday (GMT),  Glorious Trainwrecks host a rather cool monthly jam called Klik of the Month, which happens to fall this weekend. Klik and Play is the recommended development environment, but you can use anything you like – the only rule is that you finish whatever you’re working on in just two hours. More information on that here!

Personally, I’m planning to do both And can’t wait for Ludum Dare!

I finally got around to doing something I had been thinking about for a while — dumping all of my ludumdare code on a hosting site somewhere. You can find all the ld48 (and a few related contests) that I’ve participated in at:

ld48jovoc at Google Code

This has a branch for the compo versions and the post-compo versions (the trunk) of each project. Most of these are unchanged or have only minor edits (such as moving from plib to prmath).

Right now the build system needs a lot of work. About half of them build on linux, and you will need to tweak the project files a bit to build any of them on windows. As soon as I sort that out, and fix a few other things, I’ll make a release with some prebuilt binaries. But trust me, it’s not worth trying to build any of these at this point.

Non of these are finished games, they are pretty unplayable and incomplete. My favorites are BadFood, Railroad Merchant, Crossroads and The Wanderer. Which, oddly enough, also happen to be the least complicated game designs. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The other reason I did this was in preparation for the next LD48. With this set up, I can check in code as I go, providing a more or less “live” update of my progress.We’ll see how it goes.

Also, I lost the code for my LD3 “Hannibal’s Cannibal’s”, which was not a very good game, but if anyone has a copy of the old LD3 entries, please email me.

Quote = ^DJ_Link^

Hi there. Just to share that http://www.theindiebay.com/competition will be having a competition in which you can use whatever framework you want

.
It’s a 48 hour competition in which you will be given a theme or topic to follow, the rest is up to you.

Hope to see you there

Competition#1 – 19 September

Looking over the rules here, I see that I’m supposed to declare my custom libraries ahead of time!

From the MiniLDs I’ve done, I’ve built up a little bit of a framework in Actionscript 3 that I think I’ll be using again for LD 15.

I’ve put it on Google code, so you can browse it online here or grab it from svn with something like this:

svn checkout http://meyermike.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ meyermike-read-only

It’s not too fancy, but it has been quite handy for the kinds of things I’ve been making lately.  I didn’t make any documentation for setting it up or using it yet, but if anyone is interested in using it, just let me know and I can do that.

Pretty much what the title says. It’s available at http://flixel.org/. It’s licensed under the MIT license, and it’s pretty fantastic, to be honest. I’ll likely also be using the broadphase collision culling grid I built which is available here: http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=224.0

If all goes well, I should be able to participate in Ludum Dare 15. As with previous rounds that I have participated in, I will be using C/C++, OpenGL and SDL. I’m tinkering with the idea of using Box2D too, depending on if it fits whatever game idea I come up with. I’ll also be using a little framework code I put together to get started – just some technical stuff like SDL window initialization, input, texture loading, basic graphics code and such. During the other two Ludum Dare competitions in which I’ve participated (12 and 14), I learned a lot of useful things about rapid game development, so I have high hopes for the next one.

School unfortunately is starting the week before LD15 weekend… I just hope I don’t instantly get homework rushed. Depending on what kind of game I’m going to try to make, I’ll use one of two setups for my game:

Physics game or similar
ActionScript 3 in the Flash 3 IDE, using Box2DAS3. I’ve been meaning to try this out but haven’t got around to it.

Other
C++ in Code::Blocks, using a conglomeration of SDL, SDL_mixer, SDL_ttf, and my own code, PlatyGame. I’ve finally seen the miracle of version control, so I might put it on Google Code, but for now fetch it at http://apps.platymuus.com/programming/platygame/PlatyGame.zip. That’s not strictly the version I have right now but it will be within the next 24 hours or so when I get around to uploading it.

And I sure hope I have some clue as to what to do with the theme.

EDIT: Okay, finally uploaded current PlatyGame… if it explodes though, not my fault (also meaning I might change it in the middle of the compo)

Well, it’s not much of a press pack, but it certainly has a logo.

Under the bookmarks to your right, you’ll find a new link.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/logo-and-press-pack/

There you’ll find high resolution transparent PNG versions of the logo you now see at the top of the page.  Also a source PSP file for those few still living Paint Shop Pro users.

If there’s anything else like that you guys (and gals) want, let us know.  We’ll do what we can.

Tags: press

I would just like to pronounce my intent to participate in the upcoming ludumdare. Provided that this week does not turn into chaos, of course.

Having recently installed a trial version of Unity3D, i’ll be attempting to use it for the competition. Luckily the trial period lasts well beyond the weekend, so I should be covered there. Using this middleware will help me tremendously in both getting to create the gameplay faster, and (more) importantly actually making other people able to play with it. Both of these points have been very limiting factors for me in previous lds, so I hope that using Unity3D will make it much smoother

I’ve got it setup so that I can use Visual Studio for all code writing (seriously, auto-complete/intellisense is necessary to be efficient), and i’ll be using Photoshop/Blender for other asset creation.

Bring on the theme-voting!

Wee — LD15. Color me excited, or deep turquoise.

In the name of honesty, and because there’s been a flurry of this sort of activity of late, I thought I’d post a link to my framework code that (pending theme selection and noggin-bursting spasms of creativity) I’ll be using this weekend. I call it Bebop, partly because it’s proved relatively useful for improvisation, but mainly because I’m madly in love with clever acronyms. A (slightly) more exhaustive description posted over in blogland, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Ok. Let’s get cracking, folks.

Heeey!

This is gonna be my first compo, and I’m excited for this. =D

I will use C++ and Allegro, ’cause I’ve been playing with it for a few years… Code in Windows, but using mostly opensource softwares, such as gimp, inkscape, netbeans (or notepad++, who knows…) and mingw compiler. I’d use GitHub, if I could set my git to work with github in windows… but whatever… haha

I’m reallyyy excited, cannot wait! hehe

Hey everybody!

Probably the biggest thing that didn’t go well last time was entry voting.  So we’d like your help to artificially create similar conditions as last time, that way we can tweak a few things before the real compo begins.

So here’s what I’d like you to do.  First off:

READ THIS CAREFULLY

We’re going to create a fake compo that happened sometime in the year 2000.  The year is important, because we don’t want to litter the front page with these posts.

SERIOUSLY! READ THIS CAREFULLY!

Create a new post and do ALL the following.

1. Choose the category LD Test from the categories box.
2. Add a Final tag in the Post Tags box (don’t forget to click Add)
3. Set the date to any day in the year 2000.  You can change this in the Publish box, by clicking Edit beside “Publish immediately”.  *IMPORTANT*
4. Upload a screenshot to the blog! You must upload a new image! Tutorial here.

Give your post a reasonable (or silly) name.  Pick a tasteful (or silly) picture.  And fill the body of the post with some text, just for completeness.

DID YOU ACTUALLY READ ALL 4 THINGS?

If you did this right, you should show up here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-test/

Checklist (circle your answer)

• I picked a date in Y2k (i.e. year 2000) [True/False]
• I uploaded an image to the blog [True/False]
  • My image shows up in the grid [True/False]
• I couldn’t think of a 4th point, but is your image showing up in the grid? [True/False]

If you’re screenshot is uploaded correctly, it should show up when you click “show me the grid” at the top of that page.  If you don’t, then for whatever reason your image isn’t in your posts local gallery (some wordpress feature we’re utilizing to make the grid work).  Delete your image, and re upload it (i.e. step 4).

Thanks!

PS: The answers should all be true.

Like a few other here, this’ll be my first LD. I’ll be using Construct for the creation of the binary if my concept ends up being 2D. For 3D, I have a variety of technologies I’d like to explore.

The first is Dage. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days now, and even though the odds of me getting to make a 3D adventure game are hard, I’d certainly embrace the chance to use my recent experience.

I’m also not above Unity, if the trial is viable.

No matter what I use to assemble the game, though, I’ll be using Blender, Photoshop, and Notepad++ for the majority of modeling, texturing/art, and writing, respectively. I know that I’m a bad egg and should use GIMP–but, hey, I like Photoshop’s interface better. If I wind up with Dage, I’ll also have to use Max in my pipeline, another evil, commercial program.

As far as my experience in other areas, I’ve tried a few compos, followed more than a few, but never made a real entry. I’m determined to sneak one into this LD. I’m pretty experienced with Construct, Blender, and Photoshop, and I’m just learning other techs like Unity and Dage. I grasp programming concepts pretty well (Event Sheets in Construct come almost naturally to me), but I fail pretty hard at actual programming (even XNA is beyond me). I like it that way. I like that in this modern day and age, there’s a bunch of technologies (Construct, MMF, AGS, Wintermute) that allow you to script an entire game without programming it. I like that many things are set up for you, and I like WYSIWYG. There’s nothing wrong with WYSIWYG in my book–if you can create something totally awesome, it doesn’t matter by what means.

Anyway, that’s me. Sorry for being wordy. I can’t wait to participate, honestly. I’m sure I’ll be dreading my decision in about 144 hours.

Tags: 2D, adventure, blender, compo, construct, dage, first, first compo, intro, photoshop, tools

I’m pretty excited about the compo. I’ll definitely be entering, and using my regular tools: Slick, LWJGL or possibly Java2D. I’ll also be using my SlickTemplate again.

Tags: LD #15 - Caverns - 2009, ld48

I’m probably using a new library this time.   It’s not terribly full featured at the moment but what it does have is a simple way to get a nice Fullscreen framebuffer on the OLPC-XO.   I figure If I can write a halfway decent Game during the Ludum Dare then it can be added to the XO’s repertoire.

The source for the library is in here along with a small test program I wrote last week to give it a try.

http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/doodle.tar.gz

I’ll probably be be adding things to the library right up to and most likely during competition time.  If anyone else wants to give the lib a go (Yes, It’s pascal) get in touch and I’ll make sure you’re up to date with the code.

This is how simple a program can be using the Lib.

program demo;
 
 uses
 Drawing,simple16;
 
 var
 pic : tPicture;
 
 procedure Load;
 begin
 ScreenMode(640,480);
 pic := tPicture.loadFromFile('Frog.png');
 end;
 
 var
 X : Single = 320.0;
 Y : Single = 200.0;
 dy : Single =0.0;
 dx : Single =0.0;
 
 procedure Update(ticks : integer);
 begin
 X:=X+dx;
 Y:=Y+dy;
 dx:=dx+ random()*0.2-0.1;
 dy:=dy+ random()*0.2-0.1;
 dx*=0.99;
 dy*=0.99;
 end;
 
 procedure Draw;
 var
 i:integer;
 begin
 ClearScreen;
 DrawImage(pic,X,Y);
 end;
 
 begin
 Run(@load,@update,@draw);
 end.
 

The run procedure calls the Load update and Draw functions at the appropriate times, giving a picture that does an inertial drunkards walk around the screen.

The definition of the Ludum Dare competition is:

“Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated solo game development competition. Entrants develop games from scratch in 48 hours, based on a theme suggested by community.”

But it seems we are doing things less “from scratch” than we used to. People are now using full fledged engines, physics libraries, their own engines, etc. I don’t think this satisfies the definition anymore.

I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing. After all there is limited fun in reimplementing texture loading and opengl setup in every competition, especially since all those simple things can very easily add up to whole day and leave only half the time for more creative tasks. But have we gone too far?

Is LD48 a competition meant to be from scratch or using existing engines? What do you guys think about that?

And now, you kids can get off my lawn…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 2:21 am 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.

By hook or by crook, I will be making an appearance for this weekend’s LD15.  I need to definitely wrap some things up before this coming weekend, not least of all getting together my collection of Python code I hope to use for this coming competition.  I still need to clean a bunch of it up and make sure it’s good to go, but sometime Wednesday I’m hoping to have it up for public download so that I’m all in compliance with the rules.  Beyond that, totally looking forward to yet another weekend of insanity and insomnia in an attempt to crank out something worthy of being called a game.

So, I’m very excited, it’s been a few (last was LD11), but I am planning to enter LD15 now – Currently throwing together a C++/win32 lib that I’ll be using for my entry (will release wed or so), and working on a new display app for timelapse v2.0 >:)
Looking forward to it!

This compo will be very abbreviated for me: prior commitments reduce my available time to about 4 hours. But I’m still going to waste a few judges’ time with whatever I can throw together in that interval!

Tools: LOVE2d, Photoshop, Goldwave, and adrenaline.