So, here it is, my entry for Caverns:
Refuge puts you in a turret defending one of the last cities of humanity from the alien invasion.
There is soo much more I wanted to do with this, and didn’t have time… but isn’t that always the story? It was a mad rush for the finish line, but I think I got it to a playable state.
Now I must go eat, because my stomach has begun consuming itself. Timelapse and postmortem to come later!
Tags: journal, screenshot
Tags: motivation
Finish the competition
YEA~!!! watch that – feel good with ur self for the hard work and Good Night mates~!
“Like a boss~!” ^_^
So I’m pretty happy to finally post my first ever completed entry for Ludum Dare. Check out Into the Pit: The Endless Caverns here!
It’s a game heavily-inspired/influenced/ripped off from level 2 of Battletoads for the NES (which was one of the more sane levels in that game). You basically go around avoiding spikes/traps and killing bats with a simple dash attack. Like Battletoads you can juggle the bats for extra points and to regain health. The game goes on forever until you die. Right now there’s plenty of chance of that due to the lack of end stage balancing since I ran out of time near the end and wanted to get things like menus done.
This time around my goal was over the first 24 hours to come up with a fully-playable prototype and to spend the last 24 hours adding graphics, audio, and polish. Surprisingly enough that actually held true for the most part. I managed to come up with the basic game late last night and I spend most of today on things like finer gameplay details and working on sprites and sounds. You may notice my explorer sprite is a little too close to comfort to a certain famous indie game character. Forgive me for that, I really suck at pixel art and being derivative was the best I could do.
One thing I’m actually really pleased with is how at the very end (literally the last 2 hours) a more ominous feel entered into the game. On a whim I added in some rumbling sounds that I looped continuously on the menu screen. Combined with screen shaking I really dug the “collapsing cavern” atmosphere that was being generated so I ran with that. If I had a little more time I would have liked to have added touches like falling debris and other signs of collapse.
Regardless I hope people enjoy it. Have fun and feel free to criticize and comment.
Note: It was made using Flixel which I understand is perfectly fine for this competition. And I can safely say that without Flixel there’s no chance in hell I would have had anything completed.
And that’s that. It ended up… not as polished as it could have been. As is always the way. I would have liked to have got a variety of weapons and some different aliens in there. As it is, I threw in the smaller enemies literally at the last minute so I don’t really know how difficult it is.
LoneStranger's Caverns
I finally got my entry done. It’s not nearly what I wanted it to be, but that’s ok. It’s ok because it’s still a game. Most of the time my entries end up being tech demos or proofs of some concept at the deadline. This one is different though. The engine itself is complete enough that you can create levels for it and actually play them.
If you’ve ever played the Kroz games, you’ll see the similarities. I used it as massive inspiration. I tend to forget about it when I think about my favorite games growing up, but there’s no denying that I spend hours upon hours playing it.
I can see myself working with this afterward, making the engine more robust and fixing some of the things that can be done in a more efficient manner. There are plenty of new objects and mechanisms to create. I only created a few of them. I could create other monsters too.
Right now there is only one level, and it doesn’t have any kind of ‘campaign’ code to link more of them together, but that would certainly be in the cards. A level editor would also be a must, as I did this first level using just a text editor and about twenty minutes.
For now though, I’m going to go spend time with my family who I have ignored this weekend. And hey, maybe go to bed early. There is work tomorrow. 
Have fun with LoneStranger’s Caverns!
Tags: caverns, final, kroz, ld48_15, screenshot
Oooh, magic mushroomies!
Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)
Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.
Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.
What when wrong
What went well
I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).
Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.
Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!
So I was just beginning to have fun. Here’s a vector type of miner race. But before anything I’ll represent you my accomplishments in game development.
-In highschool (about 7 years from now) I programmed a snake game, it included a rabbit with basic run-away algorithm aside from apples.
-One or two months ago I made a shoot’em up type of thing with pygame which you are controlling a plane and there are two monsters in screen and background is scrolling.
-And now I made this.
So I hope you won’t blame me now 
Strength lies in knowing your weaknesses, they say. I knew I couldn’t try anything more complicated. At least I learned some basic things.
So what I present you is a miner racing game (where one racer rides the mine tracks and the other, well, the ceiling) with real fake 2d physics and polynomial interpolation as a track editor. Cars act like roller coaster, they can’t leave the rails. Did I mentioned no sprites?
So first, what I was able to pull;
– If I had 2d physics, I needed 2d collision detection too (even though pygame can collide some stuff). So I made a fake 2d physics engine. It just calculates the impact of gravitational force and then everything is 1d. Still looks 2d.
And what doesn’t work as expected but still better than nothing
– I wanted to let the user enter an array of 2d checkpoints and then create a track from it by polynomial interpolation. Bad thing is I used Lagrange polynomials. I wanted to use them since they didn’t need any slope information. But midway I wanted to have horizontal start and finish lines. I should have gone with something smoother but I don’t really remember much of interpolation and I didn’t had time to read again.
– Appearently zooming in and out of a surface is expensive especially if the surface is big enough to hold your whole track. Something can be done if drawn polynomial tracks are optimised in some way, like rendering on-the-fly with level of detail. Still camera can track the arithmetic mean of 2 cars.
Things I would have added if I had some more time
– Fake collision detection in 1d. I was planning to have obstacles on road, throwing molotov cocktails at each other, rocks falling down(can’t think of a cavern game without this). And even changing tracks (like jumping up to the track above and hit the other car on the back)
– Calculating stuff so that I could tell if the tracks are colliding or seperated too much. Setting minimum margin so that the guys’ head don’t collide. Compare lengths of tracks. Putting vector rail woods every 10 unit and vector lights hanging down from upper track every 100 units. Simple calculus stuff like that.
– The racers (flowers on the pots) would have physics too. Like ragdolls, their heads would go back as you accelerate and hit their head to the front of the car if you lose speed suddenly.
– Everything’s ready to implement car graphics but I’m not sure if rotating surfaces work well in pygame. The tracks can have sprites too. (but someone has to draw them first, of course)
So here are some screens and a link to code if you want to try it. You’ll need numpy (scipy is not needed I guess) and pygame and a python interpreter of course.
Now that I used my extensive knowledge on high-school physics, basic calculus (taking derivative of polynomials really) and the numerical analysis course I took 2 years ago which I forgot everything except Lagrange polynomials, I can finally move onto real 2d stuff with linear algebra.
Of course I’ll fall asleep/faint on my bed first.
I submitted the game an hour ago, but I forgot to post on the blog!
Play it via the browser <a href=”http://www.deadpanda.com/lj/ld15submit.html”>HERE</a>, or grab the download (Windows or Mac): <a href=”http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=472″>HERE</a>
I’m very excited because this is my first successful ludumdare entry. My last two attempts crashed and burned, and this was pretty close to doing the same. I was able to scrape it with a few rough edges and submit it on time.
I was really busy so I didn’t upload my latest food photos. Here goes!
An orange and Dr. Pepper pre-lunch snack.
And then I totally forgot to take a picture of my In’n’Out burger, but I guess pretty much everyone can guess what it looked like. Here’s dinner though:
Nom'd pasta with peas and chicken.
Wow… I’m still shaking from the excitement of that final crunch. I worked on the game pretty much all day today only breaking for necessary bodily functions. Got it submitted less than one minute before the deadline. And I’m really pleased with how it came out! Yesterday I hated it, but today everything seemed to click together like a jigsaw puzzle.
And I had a BLAST making the music. I recorded and edited it all in Audacity. I performed it on a little quarter-size Denver acoustic guitar I bought a couple weeks ago for a camping trip ($100 CAD). I also used a Bluesband harmonica (just a cheap little thing). As for the microphone… it’s just a crappy $40 Logitech thing from Future Shop I bought for voicechat in online games. I uploaded the soundtrack as a separate ZIP file as well, for anyone who’s interested: http://mattmakesgames.com/soundtracks/BrokenCaveRobotSoundtrack.zip
Overall I’m happy with all the weird little ideas I got to try out in this game. The first two days consisted of me dumping every idea I had into the game – today was me sewing it all together.
Finaly I’m done… everything works for the best I hope =]
I worked mostly on graphics, luckily I’m quite fast with drawings and my tablet helped me a lot to make things faster and easier =]
about the game, I didn’t have time to add sounds or music or make a decent menus and intro which I planed… instead I decided that I will go for polishing the game abit… I made 7 levels with bonus levels anda final boss =]
features
Download
Screenshots
Tags: ld48_15, motivation, sleep
Well, couldn’t get a demo working in time. This is my second LD and my first fail. I’ll try to take away some of the sting by detailing what went wrong!
I wanted a procedurally generated cavern that you could climb using a grappling hook. I wanted the grappling hook to be modeled as realistically as possible, so it would react like real rope and not stretch much, wrap around corners, etc. Turns out this is a pretty tough thing to do 😉
I used the Bullet physics library because I’ve messed with it before, and also because I saw a demo for Softbody Rope which seemed exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, like EVERYTHING in that library, the rope was very sparsely documented. It took me almost 10 hours to get it working. This was something I hoped to get done in an hour or so.
Finally, at the end of my first day I got the rope behaving somewhat how I wanted. Good enough to proceed at least, so the second day I focused on cavern generation. I wanted to be able to create interesting geometry out of a huge block, so I decided to implement the “marching tetrahedrons” algorithm for turning a volumetric dataset into polygons. This took longer than anticipated due to a silly small mistake that was hard to track down. It didn’t help that I was already bummed about losing so much time due to the rope issue 😛
So after finally getting the rope working and a basic cavern generated, I tried to add the cavern mesh to Bullet and get some collisions going. Unfortunately this is when the deadline snuck up on me, and despite coding furiously I couldn’t finish in time. I do think I’ll continue with this concept until I get something playable.
Despite the fail, I had a great time as usual. I’m happy about finally implementing the marching tetrahedron algorithm, as I have a few project ideas that will definitely benefit from it. And as much as I want to hate on Bullet right now, it is a fun library to play with. Just not the most fun when there is no documentation and precious little time to comb through source files trying to figure out how something works.
I’ll end with some random shots of things going wrong
Tags: post-mortem
You can watch 36 hours of my game development on Angry Caverns compressed into 3 minutes here in my timelapse video on YouTube.
It was my first year doing a timelapse and I think I’m hooked. So much fun to see the creative process!
Time to sleep soon too…
Here is my timelapse video for Cave Miner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmhxYSmflg
You can play the game here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/CaveMiner/
Tags: timelapse
31 hours in 5 minutes ^__^.
Tags: timelapse
Had I known that I was going to end up with such an uninteresting game, I wouldn’t have bothered, but since I already did, here’s the timelapse video. At least it’s a short one.
It’s amazing, after a relaxing swim and glass of wine, I came back to the computer and quickly fixed a few bugs that were really annoying me about the last version.
Here’s the change list:
– Net now kills any Grags on it, when set to capture mode.
– Pouper now grows out from its center, not oddly to its right.
– Now you have to get pretty much all of Brinie in the net to capture her. Winning when just getting her partway in the net makes it a little too easy I think.
Here is the new version for windows, mac and linux:
http://www.divshare.com/download/8334544-ac5
By the way, this is one program that will chew up as much cpu as you got. an overclocked i7 would be great if you want to see 1000s of Grags moving around at 30 frames per second. Will only use one core though. My dual core machine can get maxed to 50% with one core in full use while playing.
Have fun, or at least, enjoy the sand box of dead.
I should have just submitted Spelunky
So close and yet so far. Two hours short of really putting in an entry. Second Ludum Dare first failure.
In SGDSGU you are a telekinetic kid escaped from a covert government facility. Once they became aware of your escape, they sent out zombies to do away with you. As far as controls go, just click the fully formed stalactites at the top. Puncture zombie heads and try to stay alive!
(You can download what would have been the final here (play it in the stand alone flash player instead of the browser).
Currently missing:
– Win condition.
– Sounds.
– Stalagmites to block the zombies.
– More user feed back (hover mouse over stalagmites causes a glow).
– Gore effects.
– Optimization 😛
I’m still running on the high of getting the game done on time, figure I may as well decompress with a mini post-mortem.
What Went Right
Concept
Settled on a pretty simple concept.
Art
The animation and character creation went extremely smoothly in flash. I like how everything turned out visually. Flint also eased the burden art wise with some neat dynamic deaths for the zombies.
Programming
Flint was pretty easy to get up and running, the examples that came along with it could not make it any easier to use.
The game programmatically was not all too complicated, so most of that went pretty smoothly as well.
What Went Wrong
Concept
I wasn’t too big on the caverns theme as it left so many options open (?). Yes too many options, through together a bunch of concepts. They were pretty easy to narrow down, most of them included tilesets, yet, since I’ve never drawn tilesets from scratch I was pretty apprehensive about going that route. I did a lot of humming and hawing as Flixel looked like the perfect little engine for this competition. Easy to generate some random caverns toss a ninja rope in there, and bam you’re done. In the end my fear of pixel art was enough to keep me away.
Art
I hate flash registration points.
I need to have a timer going while I’m working on the art, I put way too much time into making the art bits, when a good chunk of it didn’t get used. I know placeholder art, generally becomes the final art. So I try to get it done all in one go. Having the same problem last compo, I think I’ll have to go about it differently next time around.
Programming
Wasted a little bit of time getting up to speed on Flint. I have to stop using Ludum Dares as a way to try new things. I need to start dealing with the learning curves before the competition.
Placed my registration points way too willy nilly, wasted way too much time programmatically shifting bitmapdata and registration points around.
Sleep
Squandered a bunch of time sleeping, got a decent 20 hours of sleep in.
—
I got most of what I wanted accomplished. I wish I would have had more time to play around with Flint to create some neat gore effects but oh well. Despite all the extra time I sunk into the artwork, it was a good experience, it was good to spend some quality time with my tablet.
Congrats to all you guys the majority of the games this time around look really phenomenal.