Part burrowing theme, part cavern theme is what my entry will be. The character (probably going to be named Jimmy) fell down a dry well. Convieniently, he happened to have a pickax. found a hole in the ground and brought a pickax for an adventure. He starts digging away at the walls of the cavern to see what he will find. I hope to have a game where you can take different approaches. There on one hand is the ability to dig around and see what you find in the world of underground. I also hope to add some building mechanic beyond carving away at the rock so that you can start a little house underground.

It is the year 2218, and you are a zoologist, the first to travel to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. You find there an ice world teeming with life. Small, precious life that’s nothing like what exists on Earth. What you discover is an eco-system completely out of balance. The Grags, small fierce beasts with the temperament of piranhas, are wiping out all other creatures on Europa.

You contact your superiors on Earth to ask what do to, and they give you their answer. Whatever you do, don’t tamper with the existing eco-system! You agree to this, until you discover Brinie, the rarest of God’s gifts to the Universe, the most precious and beautiful being you have ever seen. Imagine the beauty of a baby harbor seal, the blob, a humpback whale, and the Sun all combined into one. You know instantly that you must do whatever you can to preserve what is perhaps the last of this species.

So using the tools provided to you, you must guide Brinie through the icy labyrinth, and past dangerous Grags to your safety net.

Do you have what it takes to save Brinie from extinction?

After making Stygian Tunnel Beast I was kind of hoping both Burrowing and Caverns would lose, but despite this I think I’ve got a pretty simple but compelling idea that I like. It involves  side-view, a really big cavern, soldiers, guns, and a jetpack. I think it’s pretty different from what Gilvado has in mind

Trying Allegro for once! Thanks madgarden for the name and the intro.

I wanted flashlights to win, but Caverns works too. I’ll still be able to pull off what I wanted to.

Of course, an hour and 30 minutes into the competition, I have a buggy engine.

Well at least something is playable.

/me gets back to brainstorming ideas

An idea I’ve been wanting to try out. I doubt it’ll get finished, but if nothing else I’ll have a nice mock-up for my troubles.

All right, it’s finished! This is a story-heavy exploration game with puzzles and Collectible Card Game elements. Go ahead and give it a try. I’m very proud of this game–it was definitely a rush to make everything in time!

Windows-only link:

http://www.sinisterdesign.net/Downloads/Harvester(LudumDare48Hr).exe

Windows/Mac/Linux link (.air file–open with AIR):

http://www.sinisterdesign.net/Downloads/Harvester(LudumDare48Hr).air

Got the menu system going.  Spent too long making it “pretty” (or at least, stylistically consistent with what I imagine the game will be).  Got to keep moving-  on to level generation/rendering.

Caverns, eh?

I was away from my desk for the first hour, so I wrote my ideas on paper. Now it’s time to get them inside the PC.

(Left: paper, right: PC.)

I think I’m going to make a cave flier – perhaps a homage to the QBasic game “Mayhem”, by Alex Smith, which I played to pieces back in the day.

I guess I voted for this theme. I just picked a catchly title for this post, but still have no clue what I will do. Maybe it’ll be a platformer game with some “Dungeon Keeper”-elements or something else entirely.

Anyway, I made a photo of my workspace. Here it is:

Chaotic as usual

Btw: It’s about 06:30 AM here (Saturday), I just woke up and I’m still a little sleepy, so it might take a while until a brilliant idea comes to my mind.

Tags: deskphoto

Normally I rack my brains for hours on end trying to come up with an idea for game based on some central theme.  But lo, not this time!  I’ve actually got what I think will be a doable and fun game.  Basis for inspiration is the old original Metal Gear games for NES.  Essentially you will try to progress through a series of caves, either attacking enemies with some form of weaponry, evading them by slipping into cracks and crevices, or creating obstacles between you and them by blowing holes in the cave floor with dynamite (this last one is actually a stretch.  would love to add it in, but we’ll see how it goes).  For reference, here’s an image from the old school game itself:

Image from old game Metal Gear for NES

To add some more depth to it, I want to add in some adventure game aspects as well so it’s not straight arcade.  Simple things like talk to NPCs, gather a few items and solve some inventory puzzles in order to advance through the game.  My pipe dream would be to also add in a mini game or two to act as some of the puzzles, but really, I don’t this will happen in 48 hours.  But hey, who knows?  Things seem to be going smoothly right now, so we’ll see.

I’d add some images of concept sketches and what not, but currently my camera battery is dead, so I’m charging that now.  Once that’s charged, I’ll be able to take part more in the photo blogging aspect of this competition too.

Not off to a great start with my underground space ice cavern game. Construct hates me and is refusing to erase chunks from the canvas, which is kind of a problem since it’s not going to get very caverny if I can’t subtract anything.

Okay, I’m going to be mixing Burrowing into my Caverns, since they go so well together anyway and I really liked Burrowing. The plan is to create a stripped down ‘tactical RPG’-style game (read ‘stripped down’ as ‘without the RPG part’), with various underground critters duking it out Final Fantasy Tactics/Advance Wars style. Lord knows if I’ll be able to pull it off.

Anyway, I’ve set up a BitBucket repository, so, time to get started on some basic groundwork before I head to bead.

Food was Pizza, Ceasar salad, and Cranberry juice.

Day 1 Dinner - Pizza, Salad, Juice

Tags: foodphoto, idea, journal, repository

Well, looks like I might get a game done.  It’s going to be command line, that’s all I’ll reveal right now. Windows only, too :(. I wanted to make it Mac and Linux too, but it won’t happen. I don’t mind though, it’ll be a cool game.

Ok, somebody LUDUM Dared me to make a cavern based on a variation of Conway’s Game of Life. Here’s a page about using the game of life to generate mazes, which HOPEFULLY, will be harnessed to make a cave. http://conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Maze Here we go, we’ll see if this works… A first person cave exploration game. (An actual gameplay mechanic is yet to come)

Well my goal for tonight is to think of an idea.

Here is my desk:

Tags: desk, deskphoto, makeovers

Here’s the first shot from my game, Cavern Tycoon. This is the result of a whole night’s work of labor here, and although I’m quite proud of it, I know it doesn’t look like much. Early tomorrow I’ll start expanding the framework and making a few more graphics, after some much-needed short rest. Goodnight LDers.

Well, the theme is caverns, the first thing that came to my mind was the movie (1959), shining caverns and dinosaurs!!

I’ll try to make some little exploration (motroidvania) game.

Desktop with 5 lt. of water.

Tags: deskphoto

there ya go. a title screen! now you can wonder about what muslim purity has to do with caverns.

here, too, are the tools of the trade:

and last, but certainly not least, the first alcoholic beverage consumed during this fine, fine evening. or morning, is it now?

It’s 7am in Prague (2 hours since LD15 started), I’ve just sketched out three game ideas and selected the one that looks the most interesting and amusing to me

Time to set up a work schedule, doodle some basic gfx and dive into coding. Seems like a busy but exciting day for me

Good luck to you all!

Oh, BTW, my desktop mess:

So I was having trouble with an idea.  I’m trying to stick with the definition of cavern which is a naturally occurring void in the earth, and perhaps that’s too limiting.  I came up with two concepts I like though, and one I’m going to develop.

The runner up for me was Stalactite.. here’s the crummy mockup:

Where the idea was to grow stalactites by somehow moving the water around. The soluble minerals that could become stalactites would be limited resources, as would the water. But although that could be a neat simulation, I didn’t see a game.

Option 2 is a competitive game where there is a town being built over a cavern. There are two players (I’ll initially code hotseat multiplayer, and then code some type of AI). A grid represents the town, and another grid represents the cavern. Each turn a player can either place a building, or a support. Buildings have different weights. If the stress at a given point exceeds some constant (TBD), a sinkhole forms and the buildings within the confines of the sinkhole fall to the cavern level and are out of play. The game ends when… (I’m not sure yet). Each player gets points for his opponents buildings in the cavern, and loses points for his own buildings in the cavern.

My goal for the rest of the evening is to get a mock-up done of this, and a basic UI.

-TF