Hey there,
sadly we won’t be able to finish the game in time for the MiniLD. Real life got in the way big time. This is how far I got on the programming side. Nora hasn’t been able to do any graphics due to illness, so you have to live with my glorious programmer art.
This is a really, really early prototype, just implemented a simple screenshake and some shooting. Also I show off the manipulation of the rate of fire of the weapon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iEIXHmyT3g

All is not wasted, though. We plan to develop this further and hopefully create a nice #1GAM entry out of it.

Cheers and good luck to the rest of you,
Marcus

Tags: GameMaker Studio

To slow?

Hello to all you programmers! I think I might have been a little bit slow this weekend. Honestly I was not, but the idea of the game that had grown in my head got bigger and bigger in such a short time. The last LudumDare I could stay focused on what I really needed. This time some things were just different.

First of all: I forgot an appointment, not any appointment at all, but the birthday party of my grandma. I used that gap of some hours for brainstorming and getting ideas. Which worked very well by the way. This was on saturday. On Friday I already started with the old core-engine of the game “We Rule The World”. The basic concept behind the idea was, to get in control of the whole world by growing your influence all over the world. It looked nice in the first place:

But after some hours of testing I realised, that it was…. more or less…. ugly as hell, and the performance was also not the best. So, my decision to completely turn the style of playing the game was made by me on saturday noon.  The concept of ‘tiny’ triangles that shaped the continents of the world was forgotten quicker than I thought and was replaced by the concept of national capitals influencing the world’s population.

The basic idea

And that’s not all. By the given theme “Conspiracy” I formed a gameplay that felt in my head like a mixture of “pandemic or plague inc” and some sort of realtime strategy game with the mystical charme of  the Bilderberg-group or Rothschilds. The aim of the game should be to gain influence all over the world by installing systems to get in control of the population of each country – or at least enough – let’s say 90% to win the game. Not every system is being liked by every nation. Or do you like surveillance-systems? National capitals should also influence each other by connections between them. Not every nation is connected to others, but if they are, a dangerous cocktail of fast growing connections and wrong trusts starts to run riot.

New style

The new style of the worldmap satisfied me completely. It was simple, not to much effort to get to this result and easy to display in the game itself.

Coordinates & data: hell on earth

The hell on earth is really non-generic data. No wonder they came up with crawlers, searchbots, etc. to get rid of this hell. Really, I lost about 2 or 3 hours by putting some data: Capitalname, Coorinates, Countryname, Population, Density of the Population from wikipedia, in my game. And all I reached was maybe the half of the data I needed for the game. There were still about 150 or more capitals missing.

This was the reason I came to my friend Andrian, also a very clever programmer and data-specialist who had certain experience in writing scripts that can catch data from websites, hyperlinks and their content inclusive. He offered me his help and wrote a script in about an hour which worked perfectly good and could also put the data in the right order and forms! I finally had 212 National Capitals in my game…. but I still missed so much time.

Ideas, concepts, Icons and Texts

I got another helping person, Hamster2K ( Also on twitter @Hamster2k) who helped me very much this evening. We brainstormed about concepts of the gameplay and ingame systems, that would make the game believable and much more realistic in an abstract sense than I planned it to be. Thank you very much for this Hans!

I made Icons for the systems by the given information he searched before and put in the funny, intelligent descriptions of the systems, so that it looks really really nice at the moment.

I don’t want to say, that I give up. Of course I don’t want to. But I think the time might be to short to finish the project with the concentration and abandon it now deserves. I’m still working on it( http://www.twitch.tv/thewhitellama ) I thinik for at least an hour or so until I go to sleep.

The MiniLD was more a practice for me than a competition. Fixed limits of time and an appointment to stick to. It was more a practice to get used to the fast thinking, programming and organising and to get the right feeling for the LudumDare comming in April. But at least: I’ve got a new really really interesting game, that is almost finished to work on. And I got to know some interesting people during the MiniLD. These facts make it hard to say no to the next Ludum Dare 😉

Thanks for taking your time reading this article. I hoped you liked it. If you wan’t to know what happens next, just follow me on twitch or twitter. I will work on it.

The WhiteLlama

Christian Ringshofer

My Entry “Subject #48” is done. I hope you’ll enjoy it .

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=32729

Well it is finished gameplay wise anyway, but I do feel that there is a certain charm to the cubes. For a 48 hour time limit, “Nightmare” is a pretty fun puzzle game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=28788

Finished!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=29302

First Jam that me and my friend have done together (His first jam ever and my second)

This is our attempt. It is a spy thriller in which you infiltrate a supervillain’s volcano base and stop his evil scheme!

It is somewhat unfinished and I think we may have been a little ambitious with what we wanted to do, stuff like the animation took way to long and its still very rough.

It’s very much WIP but give it a go!

CONTROLS:

Movement – Left and Right Arrow Keys
Jump – Up Arrow
Open Grate – Down Arrow
Crouch Toggle – C
Judo Chop – Space
Hide In Shadows – Hold F
Open Doors and Activate Checkpoints – Enter

AIM AND TIPS:

– Infiltrate the base and get to the level exit
– Avoid guards and lasers
– Judo Chop guards to disable if needed
– Use the shadowy doorways to hide in
– Some doors need a keycard
– Hit enter on the red terminals to set as active checkpoint

Tags: miniLD #48

Okay, I admit it, my weekend was hardly MiniLD-centric. I slept normally and did a healthy amount of other things.
The result is a game that doesn’t really follow the theme and has only 10 short levels. But I did try out some things that will be useful for me in the future.

Here is my entry. Windows only:
Link!

Here it is!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/py52jtq0f2ugy3z/miniLD%2048.zip

Ninja Assassin

made by Michael Nickels for the mini ludum dare #48

You are an Assassin who has turned on your former employer.
Your job is to kill his Prime Ministers before they, or their Guards, kill you.
In this game, you are the deceiver!

controls:

W A S D or the ARROW KEYS to move the player
E or V to attack
SHIFT or SPACE to run

Enjoy, and thank you for playing!

Whoops.

I would like to take a moment to talk about my MiniLD #28 project and what went wrong though.

Bakery: Make $ome Dough is “lemonade stand” on steroids. Your bakery is a front for a secret drug operation, and the goal is to make $1,000,000 as fast as possible without getting caught.

Each day the player determines how many of each baked good they produce, as well as the number of narcotics. The baked goods sell automatically, and their sale keeps your disguise level high while also providing small profits. The real excitement and core gameplay revolves around drug sales.

The player must sell the narcotics as subtlety as possible without blowing their cover. Asking a few innocent questions is key to separating buyers from normal customers or undercover detectives. Too much questioning, however, and you end up looking suspicious or losing valuable customers.

So that’s the gist of the game. Why didn’t it get finished?

First and foremost, Unity is simultaneously awesome and the absolute worst sometimes. I encountered a bug with the development environment itself that cost me roughly 4 hours of time on the first day. Given this amount of time I could have made the game functioning on a basic level, however that isn’t the primary reason I held off on submitting. The problem was the game in its current state is not all that compelling.

Most of the gameplay revolves around picking up on subtle clues in the customer dialogue and offering the right item as well as monitoring sales to keep the bakery stocked. That’s alright, but it gets really boring after about a day or two. The dialog system isn’t robust enough to support even 10 minutes of interesting gameplay, and this is simply something that needs a lot of timing and writing.

Secondly, the intensity of the game is currently static. There are many planned features, such as a popularity rating that increases the flow of customers (and consequently makes deals that much riskier!) that would have created interesting challenges and intense moments. I spent way too long wrestling with Unity’s GUI system getting it to function properly to implement these features in a satisfying capacity, and there are dozens of other wishlist features that I knew were totally outside the scope but am nonetheless disappointed to lack.

And finally, it is incredibly poorly organized. The script files right now are a mess of nested functions and switches and variables that piled up due to poor planning. The main script file is an absolute nightmare to read at over 1200 lines and counting. Admittedly this is one of my weak spots as a developer and something I will improve on.

What went right then?

I still believe the core concept is very cool and has a lot of potential to be an intense experience. The graphics aren’t all that bad considering the time that went into them, and I learned a lot more about developing in Unity. It is technically playable in its current state, and there are entertaining moments where the dynamic dialogue system generates some interesting scenarios. I will continue to work on the game in my free time, and hopefully one day I can bring it to everyone in proper form.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: incomplete, MiniLD

Thank you for another MiniLD. It was… a hectic one, but I think my game ended up a success on the whole.

Layers is an adventure game in Twine where you infiltrate a building through your ability to shift between different states of existence.

Right now I feel like I’m never going to make another game, but I know I’ll feel differently when the next compo rolls around.

Submitted the collaboration between bitslap and me for MiniLD48. Entry page is over here or click the screenshot above.

This is the first LD I have done.

When I heard the conspiracy theme, I thought immediately about Eyes Wide Shut, and the mansion orgy scenes.

I will write more later. It was a struggle to find a way to show the pulling interests in a web of people who work with and against each other to achieve power. The game is not perfect, but I’m happy about how it came together, and there are alot of features I’d like to add after the competition.

Play it now, let me know how you like it: https://googledrive.com/host/0B9xDuJO0wZNDcWdNc3dLYi1XTEk/index.html

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=5751

Why:
I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend but after seeing people progress on irc saturday night (especially rxi and bitslap *drool*) i wanted to give it a shot anyways. Since i only got around 24 hours left i settled on a dialog text adventure. Also i wanted to make a narrative based game for quite a while.

How:
As usual i made my entry using C#. Overriding paint events of pictureboxes to render text in a custom fashion, being annoyed by unprecise measuretext methods leaving behind ugly spaces were all part of this. But generally it worked fine. I spend a few hours working on the parser/backend. It is a simple token driven script or markup language.

And it is modable! 😀

Texty text

Example:

:Narrator
 #narration This text will be describtive about the character you're talking to. Also the Narrator has to exist. it is the fallback 'person' when you end a dialog. the #narration keyword is mandatory, but will be ignored for the Narrator.
 #intro The "hello" text of the character. #intro is a [keyword]
 #keyword is a reply to a keyword determined in [brackets]
 #brackets Keywords in brackets will automatically be added as soon as you read them. You can also learn of [persons] that way.
 #persons will be identified by (Paran Thesis). To talk to another person, you have to [end] the conversation.
 #end will end the conversation
 
 :Paran Thesis
 #narration She has an round body and is generally nice and [helpful].
 #intro Hello there, what can i do for you?
 #helpful Do you want some [food] or [drinks]?
 #food Here, have some pie!
 #drinks Have a beer!
 #end Goodbye.

Open the “Dialog” file residing next to the .exe in a texteditor and paste the markup text above (play the game before that if you don’t want to get spoiled) and create your own dialog adventure! 😀

3 things though:
1. remember that #narration, #intro and #end are mandatory keywords.
2. remember that every keyword needs text
3. the win/end condition is currently hardcoded, so sorry about that, but feel free to look at the source

Furthermore, if you are interested in more features like conditional replies (yes/no), location based persons/traveling, character-bound keywords and possibly more puzzle features, leave a comment or come discuss in irc or twitter.

Lastly, there is no error handling as of yet, so if your script doesn’t work, the .exe will just crash.

Have fun adventuring! And paste your own adventures aswell 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=5751

i finally finished and submitted my entry! today was a rough day, but i suppose it was worth it. i have a somewhat finished game sort of thing now. hope you’ll enjoy.

here’s the final build: RubikBox (Web)

also, few comments worth noting:
– the game is solely rhythm-based, i.e. audio is essential to play.
– i’m afraid game controls doesn’t seem to be as intuitive as i thought of, so it might take some time to get used to the mechanics.
– i didn’t really have time to optimize the code, it should (hopefully?) run smoothly on most computers though.
– all in all, i guess i got a bit experimental on the game, nonetheless, i reeally enjoyed making it!

cheers.

So, yeah, Rogue Rush did #95 overall and we were really proud of it (especially for a first game). Guess beginners’ luck ran out, because this one is really not as good.

Well, I was pretty much alone, so it’s a given I could not produce as much as a 3 persons team, but I’m really not satisfied with myself, especially for the windows version which is plagued of bugs (and even an almost game breaking one, depending of your mouse)…

If you can find time to test it, please give me your feeling on what went wrong (beside my poor English).

Finally made it to the other side, and I couldn’t be more thrilled(although exhausted).

Stop the Spy is finally finished, a kind of strategy-subterfuge, examine-the-intel type of game. It’s fairly simple in it’s concept, but it came together rather well. This was my first jam experience, and only the third game I’ve ever completed, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. What I found was working harder than I’ve ever need to on a weekend, and loving every minute of it. So thank you to the LD community for that.

Check out Stop the Spy here if you have the chance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sleep for days.

Hello everyone, and welcome to day Two of my Ludum Dare Game Development. This is for Mini Ludum Dare 48. I am developing a game called Death Plot. You can read about it here. Anyway, today (Technically yesterday, I am writing it a day late.) was a very unproductive day. Today was the first day that I had Sebastian Benjamin in the room with me, and we both did awful. All I managed to do is as follows:

• I streamed on my Twitch Channel (uploaded to YouTube now (or soon, depending on when you read this))
• I re-implemented GameStateManagement, because the previous implementation was very bad. It was far too complex, and was creating way too many bugs. I decided to use a simpler Enum and Switch based one.
• I fixed and introduced various bugs
• I implemented a very buggy version of player bullets. Now one of the players shoots, but it is in the wrong start position, and goes the wrong direction.

I can tell you, seeing as I am writing this Day two blog on Day three, that things go much better on day three.
You can follow my Ludum Dare blogs on: www.ictuateanomaly.blogspot.com or twitter.com/Kerinova_xeon

Note: Sebastian’s Perspective of Day 1, 2, and 3.

For roughly the last 6 hours, me and Xeon have been hacking and badly programming our way through Death Plot for LD47.

A few statistics-
I’ve made-

-1 song, not including the one I made yesterday

-3 sound effects

-10 sprites/icons

-1 score system
Now, the score system *was* going to be based off of a float = GameTime kind of setup, but it was lagging the game and causing all kinds of strange issues with explicit casting. In the end, I decided to axe that system in favor of an int that += 1 every frame, because it didn’t lag out and break everything.
I forgot what caused me to do the math on the issues with ints and casting to longs, but here it is-
You can play the game for

2,147,483,647  frames,

71582788.2333 seconds,

1193046.47056 minutes,

19884.1078427 hours,

828.504493446 days,

118.357784778 weeks,

and 2.26987532451 years, before it crashes due to the number being larger than the int can hold (on a 32 bit system).

Meanwhile, Xeon’s been hard at work fixing all the bugs in the universe, and is even now swearing under his breath at the monitor.
The game is in it’s final stretches, and all that’s left to implement are the enemies and extra features such as an options menu.

Hi there,

This was my first Mini LD entry and I am now confused.

How do we actually vote for someone’s game? Is voting open yet for MiniLD48?

Please advise?

I woke up in the afternoon on Saturday, and decided I’m just too lazy to work on miniLD this time. The original idea I had would take too long to make anyway. Instead I just kept working on my post-jam and tried out what people have done for miniLD 48.

There’s quite a lot of interesting ones actually, it helps fill up the time during newgrounds’ downtime. For some, I don’t quite get how they connect with the themes, but the entries I’ve played are quite entertaining. Seems like you guys put a lot of work in it.

It’s nice to actually play some games and don’t feel like I have to vote. Sometimes voting seems like work, but for miniLD I can just play around and comment on interesting games.

So I finished my 48hr version and I will definitely be finishing this game off in the next week or so. I learned a nice amount about AI programming and animation in Unity2D.  The basic game mechanics were really nice. I’m very happy with the controls of the player and how the animations play out. The AI on the other hand, wasn’t completely finished. The Security guard’s isn’t finished and is kind of pointless. But I just threw him in as I spent so long drawing him.  Also I never got around to doing background or ground textures until the last minute.  if you are finding it too hard its because I made the players life very small because the game is extremely short and adding difficulty makes it a bit longer, the full game will have much more life than in this version.

Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-48/?action=preview&uid=27122

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DogecoinGame

Today (technically yesterday) was the only day our team (me and Sebastian) were really productive. We got the bulk of the game today. This log will be on my perspective of today. For Sebastian’s perspective on today (and the past few days) see his developer log here. Since this article is written a day later, you can download the finished game here.
I started today with a new game state management system, both of the players, and a buggy player shooting projectile system.
The first thing that I did was remove the need to press right to start moving at the beginning of the game. The reason I did this, is because, since that is the only direction you can move on the X plane, the input to move right was moot. Once you started going right you couldn’t stop, so I decided to just remove the input outright.
Now that this was done, I went to fixing my bullet implementation. unfortunately, I didn’t have the programming know-how to salvage what I had done, so I decided to just axe the current implementation and restart it. This was necessary at that point, although in hindsight, the fact that I had to restart it cost me valuable time that I could have used implementing every feature I had planned for the Ludum Dare version. Anyway, it still had bugs, namely the bullet position starting somewhere out of view, and not on the players cannon, and that it went the wrong direction, and in an arc as opposed to straight. I was able to fix all of these though. The direction was the easiest, I just flipped an errant sight that I accidently wrote as less than instead of greater than. I fixed the arc, by editing more vector positions, and the position code, by creating a new position variable, and using that instead of my very niche player position code, which didn’t work very well. The bullets were now working…. until the player goes to the upper or lower bounds of the screen. After you touch the bounds, the bullets would stop spawning in a visible location. The 48 hours was starting to wane, so I got Sebastian on a fork of the code to work on scoring and the options menu, while I used trace statements to figure out what was going wrong. I rapidly figured out the gunPosition.Y was unbounded. That was one of the many times the problem was so simple that it made me feel dumb throughout this project. I quickly fixed the gunPosition bounding. Then I completely un-object orientedly copied and pasted the whole bullet class, and all of my bullet code, but for the other player. Yeah, I should probably make the code better, but it was a time limit, and when you have a limited amount of time, you go for what works, not what is better.

By this time Sebastian had finished his work on the score, as well as finished the menu theme, and the rest of the art assets. I merged his score code back into the main code base. The score actually, the way we did it was really interesting. I don’t think it is the correct way to implement, but it was the quickest way, that didn’t cause horrible lag to the game. You can read about it on his blog here. If you were to run the game for 2.2 years, and somehow survive, the game will crash because it will run into an out of memory exception based on the limit on 32 bit systems. I kind of want to have it running in a server somewhere, with collision turned off, just to see it, but I digress.
To add the menu music, I once again hacked in a system where when you press the Enter Key in the main menu screen to go to the Game Screen, I switched the music from the menu looping, to the game one looping. This could be the right way to do it, but it seems weird.
I then added Xbox 360 controller support, which was really easy to add. Nothing needs to be written about it.
Lastly, I added the enemies, This wasn’t as bad as I initially feared it would be. I got them to spawn randomly, and move randomly very easily. I even added the facades, which were enemies that didn’t actually exist. They would shoot you, and run through you, but it wouldn’t damage you. Except that I didn’t get the shooting done in time.
Ok, really lastly, I got the game ready to publish. I fixed any bugs that were low hanging fruit, considering I had a severe paucity of time. Then I created a .exe version and a installer version of the game, packaged them, uploaded them to Dropbox, and uploaded them. apparently Dropbox was down for a few days, so I am glad it went back online in time for the upload.
We streamed most, if not all, of the development of the game on  my twitch channel: twitch.tv/ictuateAnomaly. It is from my perspective. The videos of the stream are up on the Kerinova YouTube channel now.

Do we have April dates for LD 29?

I hate to say that I’m planning that far ahead, but I’m planning that for ahead.

I’ve scanned the site, but missed any future dates…

Hi all,

I have release an Android play store version of my MiniLD #48 entry: download here

I was thinking that I need to fix the stuff that mostly irritate me with the version I submitted to the miniLD#48. If this was a proper LD, I would of course upload a newer version side by side. However since it’s just a mini — does it matter? Or is there a point to keep the original submissions as to show what can and is being done in 48h? Anyone with an opinion.

Also, since there’s no rating — please comment! Even if you don’t like the game you just played, just say something. I have the rule to write something on all games I play and as an aim to come with some constructive though too whenever I can come up with something. You can do it too!

Hey, just wanted to make a post talking about the game I made (azuritereaction) with a friend (sweetielise); it’s called A Catastrophic Date. (Hey, we only had a few hours to come up with a name!)

It’s a cute little visual-novel-esque game (no nudity/sex/romance in it though) that we thought up, and it was the first time I’d completed a game project since… probably 16 or so years ago, when I was making games with Klik & Play and Multimedia Fusion 1 back when I was about 12 years old or so.

The game itself is really short, there’s about 10 or so possible endings with 7 of them being unique, including a secret ending, too

Sweetielise did the art in probably 8 hours, and the coding took me about the same amount of time, but we got continually distracted by Awesome Games Done Quick during most of Saturday, haha.

That said… I will probably NEVER program a visual novel game like this in Multimedia Fusion 2 again. Easily one of the most frustrating programming experiences I’ve ever had, for sure. Still had a lot of fun making it though, and I hope a lot of you have fun playing it!

Additionally, feel free to check out our main work on YouTube, Twitch, and a webcomic that I write with the links below! Looking forward to the Jam sessions coming up, we’ll likely do another game for that (and any future MiniLD’s too)

YouTube
AzuriteYT
Sweetielise

Twitch
AzuriteReaction
Sweetielise

Era of Errors (webcomic)
First Page of the webcomic

Tags: azuritereaction, cat, comedy, game, indie, miniLD #48, Multimedia Fusion 2, pixel art, screenshot, silly, sweetielise, Visual Novel

Mirrors was too ambitious since I started so late due to being sick on saturday. I only had the basics, platforming and pushing objects around, but without graphics and the main gameplay mechanic implemented, come monday morning even taking a few extra hours I couldn’t finish before I had work.

What went well:
The design only took an hour or so to talk out the game with the other 2 gentlemen I was working on it with. We brainstormed a bunch of Ideas, and eventually mashed a couple ideas together to get the final outcome. It was a good time too because we literally came up with a ton of ideas, some of which I may make in my free time. These Ideas ranged from “An Illusion oriented Tetris-Style game” where the blocks are only visible for a short time to, and i’m not kidding, “Hypno-Hooker” a game about hypnotizing people into believing you slept with them and while they are knocked out, placing evidence to make it believable.

Eventually we settled on a game involving 2 paralell universes where everything is slightly different, a ‘Mirror’ world, and you would solve puzzles by jumping back and forth through a mirror.

What went wrong:
Instead of rolling my own physics engine, I decided to use Jbox2D, and I had to fight with it for a few hours just to get things to render due to it using Measurements like Meters instead of Pixels. Making logic like

“if(player.x > 400){/*do something*/}”

become

“if(player.getBody().getPosition().x > 400/worldScale){/*do something*/}”

this made debugging some things REALLY hard.

The other problem is that since I started so late, the theme was kinda difficult to implement in a timely fashion. The Concept that we came up with was definitely cool, and potentially something that could be finished in 2 days, but not if I start 24 hours late. The whole 2 worlds thing would increase development time, as making the levels would take twice as long, maybe longer if we wanted to make them slightly more interesting.

Lessons for next time:
Im sure that next time i’ll have a better handle of Jbox2D which should help make things go smoother, but seriously losing 24 hours due to sickness really screwed me over, and sadly that is something I really can’t control.

Entry Page

So the dust has settled now on Mini LD #48.  Time for a bit of a retrospective – in classic Agile Development retrospective style I’ll group them into things that made me feel “Mad, Glad and Sad”.

Sad

• I wanted to have the police “chase” you after spotting you, and have the King (and by-standers) try and make an escape if he felt threatened.  All of this is fairly “basic” state space search based AI, but I just didn’t have the time or experience with Unity (e.g. how to represent the state-graph with unity’s game objects could be an interesting challenge) to make this happen.
• I wanted more depth in the game world – I loved the chairs and tables etc getting scattered around, if I had more time I would have added more props and fun things to “play” with.
• I wanted decent sounds and music but didn’t have the time or skill to do this.  If I enter again I think I will bend the rules and try to find some public domain audio and use that instead.
• It was too dark and general dreary, and making the textures was a pain when sticking to the rules of not pre-creating or just taking other’s textures.
• I wanted to have more finesse in the buildings – smaller cubes that perhaps broke into smaller ones etc.
• No explosion effects!

Mad

• Police placement was obviously not very well spaced and needed work as they often clumped.
• There was a bug in the top-left of the map where one of the supposed-to-be-invisible spawn areas was visible.  Argh!
• Not much re-playability.  I had initially wanted to have several levels but despite having fun laying out the one level,  I didn’t have the time to do multiple levels and I struggled with manageability of Unity’s game hierarchy as it quickly became unwieldy without a proper map editor and loading system.
• Unity’s script editor is seriously deficient (at least for javascript):
  • Very slow to open, sometimes it also stopped letting me display a tab without using keyboard shortcuts or menus.
  • Watch statements & local variables during debugging were unreliable – sometimes they were not displayed which makes debugging incredibly inefficient.
  • Auto-complete only seemed to work about 25% of the time, and then when it did it often had the incorrect suggestions (basically every time I correctly typed “transform” (a class local) it changed it to “Transform” (type name) for example) and never did it have sensible suggestions for objects I had declared in my code, despite using the type declarations.
  • Finally it didn’t even highlight syntax errors so if you’d accidentally forget a semi-colon or something there was no warning in the editor, it was only when you get back to Unity itself that it tells you.  Crazy – there has to be a better way (anyone done an Eclipse plugin for Unity?)

Glad

• On the whole, I quite enjoyed it.  I got a kick out of blowing up the rooms with stuff in them and seeing the tables fly around the room.
• It was vaguely playable considering I had way under 48 hours worth of time to dedicate to this.
• Glad I didn’t do another side-scrolling indie platformer!

Oh and before I sign off, an interesting little bit of stats for you:  I used the goo.gl URL shortener to provide links to the different platforms (web, windows, linux, osx) which gives you some basic stats on how many times the link was used.  After about a week I found the following statistics on platform usage.

• Web (Unity webplayer): 87%
• Windows download: 10%
• Linux download: 3%
• OSX download: zero – not a single click

So I shant bother with OSX next time then! haha! (obligatory disclosure: I use linux & OSX at work, windows at home and I HATE using OSX compared to both linux & windows)

This miniLD I think saw some awesome games, I’ve played most but not all by now (I think). In fact I think the level of awesomeness per game is significantly higher than in the past LD28.

The miniLD had the most addictive game I’ve played so far, two LDs and this mini encountering:

I don’t know if it was the combination of wanting to have 10 presidents or those other silly upgrades, or just the joy of click-click-click.

It also had this challenging backstabbing puzzle that came with surprising depth and variety in challenges:

And the most deceptive game every:

These three have all gotten a handful comments, which is still not very much. Not for the energy and effort put into making a game in 48h. Many others have only one or two. So if you read this, it means you’ve got some coolness. You hang here, you probably make games, and you definitely are willing to play one or two. So do that, and let the maker know what was good and what could have been improved! The miniLD doesn’t have ratings and anyone registered can comment. I think I learned at least half of what I’ve leveled in game making past months from playing others’ games, so there’s something in it for you too.

PLAY AND COMMENT!

Hi everyone!

I have made a personal favourites video about this Mini Ludum Dare.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH IT

Hungry Hubert is a fast paced action platformer that was first made for the Ludum Dare #26 competition. It was named The Parasite and it got good reviews and i was quite happy with the result. I now finally have some time to make it into a full game.

You can check out the ludum dare page here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17805

It would mean the world to me if you could take your time and download the free alpha version and give me some feedback

You can download the game at www.hungryhubert.com

I would also be very happy if you could spend a few extra seconds and check out my greenlight page and perhaps put a vote for me

Link to Greenlight page

It has been a few days now since the end of miniLD#48 and I think now is a really good time to sum things up.

The Good Bricks

• The brick smashing obliterating effect with smoke and shards flying everywhere. By far my best and most well worked Unity effect. Very fun to just destroy bricks.
• The whispers from the usurping bricks and how the pointer position was used to listen in to their conspiracies.
• The code structure was kept simple and the interfaces for the classes seems to have held quite a lot of further development. Some adjustments I’ve had to do, but mostly additions.

The Bad Bricks

• The initial game was probably impossible. Way too hard! And I’m quite commonly complaining on others to make them do easier beginnings. How did I end up… I think I got too tired on Sunday to bother tweaking the game. Bad me.
• There was only one level, and it was sort of a bare thing, so much needed to be scratched from the plan due to time constraints. From simple silhouettes to make the game look architecty, to brick shakings and easter eggs.
• The controls may have been the least wonky I’ve made for a Ludum thing so far, but there were still many issues. Some of them relating to the fact that it is a 3D game but the user interacts with it as if it was 2D. Thus using 3D-distances was really not a great idea.

The Updated Bricks

I’ve added a new Level today (image above), also fixed many other things including even more fun for you when fail on a level. This is sort of an odd design strategy, to have the most effects and effort put into the loosing experience. I think it is interesting though, so I might very well dig into that idea further in a future game.

So if you have a little time on your hand, head on over an give my updated version a try. And while you’re at it, let me know what you think.

I’m hoping to join my first ludum dare as soon as possible I am currently using LÖVE, a 2D game engine built on Lua 😀

Does anyone know this? 😛

Alright, so I am hosting a game jam this weekend at this site: http://poormansggj.weebly.com/ for all those poor saps who can’t go to the GGJ. I apologize for the fact that the site isn’t very well polished or user-friendly but at least it’s something. Anywho the theme will be exactly the same as that for the actual GGJ and will be posted on the site whenever the GGJ releases their theme to the public. There are not really any rules, just have fun and make a game. Hope to see you all there!

In Ludum Dare 28 I had a go at something new and made a game solely for Android: Extreme Curling (which you can find here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=11083 as a note the play store no longer works, I’ve taken it down for a while while I’m working on it) . The game was okish but I felt it had potential as mobile game, it generated a reasonable number of installs, installs per day actually started increasing post Ludum Dare judging period.

So I’ve decided to just go for it and rather than find another job after my current contract ends, I’m going to take a shot at starting a game development company. It’s always been a dream of mine of a game development company that is established to support charities. So that’s what I’m doing, creating a company called withFire which donates a portion of profits to community chosen charities. And the first game? You guessed it Extreme Curling (well a far more polished version with a lot more features).

I’ve just started an Indiegogo Campaign to raise funds for this, so If you like to find out more about withFire you can read here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/withfire-games-for-charity

If you’re interested in this and want to help out then sharing it around wouldn’t hurt.

Finally I just want to say thanks to Ludum Dare and the community for getting me more involved in game making and all the feed-back

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2014 at 6:47 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.

I ‘ve made a postmortem video for platforms and facade.

http://youtu.be/XtZ96TFa8LI

What was that Candycrush? You got a registered trademark for the word “candy”?
Well that sure is going to make it difficult for my new game entitled “Candy candy candy”.
Ridiculously early screenshot:

Registering the trademark for a basic word. I say no.

Tags: candyjam

Our Knoxville Game Design group is featured in the cover story of our local Knoxville entertainment paper, Metro Pulse.  The seven page article gives our thoughts on the current Indie Game community, and describes our participation in the recent Ludum Dare 28 competition.  The article features interviews with Knoxville Ludum Dare participants ViNull, DylanWolf, Insane66, and myself (GaTechGrad) along with Chaosoft Games.

This paper is available for free at numerous newsstands in East Tennessee.

PDF version (identical to the print version)

Online version (formatted for the web) – Please Like/Tweet the article so they will consider doing more game development articles in the future!

Tags: SuccessStory

My candy game jam entry is finished and I’m pretty happy as it only took me 3hrs

http://glock.itch.io/candy-catcher

My twitter: https://twitter.com/DogecoinGame

Lately, I’ve had a few decisions to make in terms of the difficulty of the games I produced. I made this soccer game, which was apparently insanely difficult. I did spend a lot of time trying to win a match, and felt pretty satisfied when I did. When it came to releasing a test run of that game, it turns not only nobody was able to beat it, but nobody could even get a draw! (ok I think one person managed to win). Still, I struggled before reducing the difficulty, because I felt that players should really try to beat the challenge. On the other hand, one thing to keep in mind is that a level of difficulty that’s too high really drives popularity down, because let’s face it, it’s no fun when you can’t win ;-/ I decided to tone down the difficulty so that winning a match now is as difficult as it was to get a draw, and now it’s still very difficult to win by more than one. (I’ll try to add more levels in practice mode to draw people in.). Okay, I had to cave in. It’s concerning though, have gamers become softer, are easy going games now becoming the standard?

… read more:
http://jacklehamster.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/can-games-be-made-too-difficult/

Tags: fine tuning, game difficulty

Ok, cats outta the bag now. I never got my game finished, as you see here, and now that its uploaded, I may never will. The point of the game was supposed to be a sarcastic humor game, but now that thats done with, its nothing more than a game with unfinished paths and unprogrammed objects with one working level that’s more or less a minigame. This game may never be finished, and may never will even be played, but im hoping that if someone whats to get together with me and finish it, I have more than enough time on my hands. Two things though, 1: This game is in gamemaker, so unless you know how to use full gamemaker, its pretty pointless working with me. 2: Development might take forever, and on most days this project is mainly up to you. Im not even caring weather or not you use it with my permission, use it in anyway if you like, you may not even have to give me credit, just not for commercial use. Other than that, The only finished level is the Sword level. Use space to shoot shurikens, although they dont do anything, and dodge the bullets until you win. Thats literary it. So yeah, if you have any idea’s, try to reach me, ill be glad, but not guaranteed, to respond.

If you wanna see for yourself, check here:   http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=14064

Hey guys, for those who don’t know, I’m making a game called NIKRA (pronounced n-eye-kr-ah). I have been making this game for about 8 months now, and popularity is growing!

~~~

NIKRA is being corrupted by a dark being known as Iinenea. You have to find the 13 hidden blades of Nikra, and use them to slay the Dark Angel… or imprison it.

NIKRA is a 2D platform game inspired by many RPG games. I’m trying to capture the pure essence and fun from my favourite childhood games, as well as modern games.

I would love it if you could stop by on my blog:  CLICK HERE

The NIKRA Facebook page is almost at 200 likes too!
Please LIKE NIKRA here: CLICK HERE

Read what other people think about it:

“This simplistic nature of this game is unrivaled by the beautiful and breathtaking aesthetics of the art.” -powderblock

“Minecraft graphics with a plot to it, would play…hard” –JesusChrysler93

“So Starbound with a plot? I can dig this.” -salthetiller

You can also follow me on Twitter: CLICK HERE

Thank you so much  guys

-Seth

Tags: endesga, indie, NIKRA

Go check out or entry to Global Game Jam! Battle against other players and spread the influence of your sect!

Download & Play (17,7 mB)

How To Play

Use your mouse to move the characters of your team (you see the teams color on game start) around the map.
Try converting other characters by walking up to them – that takes some time, where you cannot move.
Stand on fields to conquer them for your team.
Your goal is it to control 11 fields on the screen!

slow with adding people to your team and walking, but can’t be converted himself
moves very fast, but switches sides quickly

walks with a medium speed and also has medium power
slow, but strong in converting people
even slower, but the strongest in converting people

Have Fun playing and drop us a note if you enjoyed it! 😉
(or if you want some pro developers to play against)

Links

http://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/prophet

The source of this project is publicly available at: https://bitbucket.org/weareprophet/
Modders are welcome (please host your own server).

Hi,

We would like to welcome everyone to check our GGJ 2014 entry, a game called Guest.

It’s a first person psychological horror game.

…training for April atm.

Ok, here’s ours (Aidenn, Thraden and mine) entry for this year GGJ:

GGJ Entry page

Read Instructions/README file before playing

We are waiting for any feedback (should we continue this, what’s ok, what’s not etc.)

Tags: poland, renegaci

Hey again!

Based off of the great feedback I got for my LD28 entry, “Digital Toilet World,” I decided to make a post-compo version of the game. Rather than expand upon the concept, I made it the game it maybe could’ve been had I a little more free time that weekend.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, “Digital Toilet World” is a humorous punk adventure game about a holy warrior and her constipated monster companion as they try to save a digitized world from a monster attack. Dodging bullets is interrupted by the occasional bathroom trip.

For those of you who’re already familiar with it, I’ve responded to the primary criticisms and have thrown a few more things in there as well:

• A Mac build
• Original music
• Juciness
• Variable difficulty levels, including poop hell mode
• Polished start and end screens
• Bug and typo fixes

Some links:

• The original LD entry page can be found here.
• The new version can be found on gamejolt or on my website.
• And while I’m here, here’s a post-mortem on the game as well as a list of some of my favorites from the compo and the jam.

Cheers! Congrats for all of the great entries last month! Can’t wait to participate in the next jam

In the past 8 weeks me and my team mates have been working on the game: Esperden.
Esperden is a story driven game, that takes place in a world between life and the afterlife.
The trailer can be found on youtube. If you click the screenshot below you head there directly to the trailer.

If there is enough interest we might try to go for a release.

Programming:
– Roy Schröder (Level editor/Importer/Controls/Audio/Gamelogic/Voice acting/Planning)
– Maikel Oelen (Shaders/Rendering/Gamelogic/Progression/HUD)
– Conner Sampson (Menu/Audio)
– Niels van Asperen (Collision detection/Documentation)

Creative
– Peter Vrieling (Models/Textures/Level design/Voice acting/2D/Planning)
– Rihards Valters (Models/Textures/ Level design)
– Alhric Ademus ( Story/Models/Documentation/ Voice acting/ Level design/Research)
– Christian Calin( Audio/Voice acting)

Information:
Engine: Micro Game Engine (c++)
Models:  Maya
LevelEditor: Unity 3D

Last Friday, we took part in Global Game Jam 2014 as a team for the first time. Drawing inspiration from Terry Cavanagh’s “Don’t Look Back”, we made a dark game about a man plagued by guilt and self-hatred as he goes about his everyday life.

Day X is a retro-looking game where you assume control of a mentally disturbed man on his way to work as he avoids and kills the numerous monsters that plague his vision. Ultimately, the story is up to the interpretation of the players.

Play Day X.

I made this entry for the rebellious candy jam… pretty sure it’s my best game so far!

Check it out!
Made with: Unity, Inkscape, Sfxr, Autotracker

Once, in a place not too different from ours, there was a people yearning for a life in peace. But they were ruled by a ruthless King who only loved one thing more than to see his people suffer. He loved candy. Most of all he loved playing a game he himself had “come up with”.

Each time the King got three candies connected, he scored. And when things were going badly, he cheated. The people had to produce new candy at an alarming rate to satisfy their King.

They had to resist.

The people started removing candies on the playing field right under his nose. They even went as far as to condition the King to play faster when they pressed a special buzzer.

The most daring used it quite often.

To gain the most, they needed the King to loose quickly while removing as few candies as possible. It was after all they who had to produce them.

Good luck, and save us all!

UPDATE: NOW FIXED STUPID TRANSPARENT MENU THING THAT WAS BLOCKING PLAY…

Give it a spin and let me know if you find it fun. Or if something could have been made better. Become the world record holder.

Lesson learned from this blunder of uploading games in the middle of the night while very tired and quite stressed: Don’t do it.

Tags: candy, Candy Jam, candyjam, unity

Today I found out there is a game called Retro Sprint 2D on the App Store. I looked at it and realised it’s almost 1:1 copy of my Ludum Dare #26 game called Chameleon Run. I guess, the guy just took my source code, replaced the music and add menu there. Bad luck

Hey Guys,

We, Neronox and me made Land of Piu for one of the competitions. We decided to make the similar for Android, and now we finished it. It’s a free 2D jump & run.

Please check the Play Store for it. Rate it and tell us your opinion

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bubblegames.landofpiu&hl=de

Hello everyone. Some time before the past Jam, i made a 2D tool for unity (way before the 2d free tools) which was put on the Asset Store. During LD#28 i read lots and lots of issues with the built in tools for unity so i figured out, why not post here a link to our Custom 2D tools for Unity.

http://www.realmwalkofsoul.com/jara-2d-animation.html

We are now on the v2.0, but still pending revision for the upgrade from the unity asset store (submitted today XD). On the Asset Store is $15, but on the link i provided you can get it for $5. LD28 was my first and i loved it, so i decided to put it on here with a massive discount, it won’t be forever so, if you want some extra 2D tools, why not try those at discount 😀

TL TR: 2D tool for unity with massive discount for a limited time, click on the link to get it.

Have a nice day 😀

Well, thanks to my having entered Ludum Dare 28, I’m now a partner in a video game company.

Yes, seriously, I became a partner in a video game company, and it was directly caused by my entering Ludum Dare 28, though it’s certainly not an outcome I foresaw.  It’s a start-up video game company, so there’s no guarantee it will really amount to anything, but hey, it’s still something.  We’ll see what happens.

If you want to know the full story, I’ve written a more detailed account in my blog.  But it’s good to know that Ludum Dare can have such an unexpected impact.

Looking forward to Ludum Dare 29…

Hello Ludum Darer’s,

I find that when I go to develop a game for Ludum Dare, or any other time for that matter, I find that I can never get anything done quickly, and that is because of the way in which I attempt to do things.  One of the things that doesn’t help is that I have no real idea of how a game should be laid out, this causes issues when coming to add new screens, new levels, and other objects into a game.

I am hoping that someone out there will read this post and have some ideas to help me on in my journey of developing games, and how I should be tackling the task.  I see people who, in the same amount of time that I have had, create much more of what is starting to look like a game when I have nothing because of the problems I encounter while trying to make one myself.

Comments would be appreciated, so please, if you have any ideas of how I should move forward please leave your ideas in the comments.

In LD26 I make simple game about dungeon “Line Quest”
And now I wand to show my release (evolution of line quest )  in Desura

- it’s Magic Book: http://www.desura.com/games/magic-book

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 1st, 2014 at 3:01 pm and is filed under MiniLD #48. 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 guys,

So we have always used Java for our previous submissions; it is portable, most everyone can run it, and can be easily collaborated on. Many of you may have heard of the programming language MatLab (more information here: http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/ ), which is primarily used for exactly what it sounds like, math. However, the language has just enough built in features that simple games can be created with it… So here comes the question: how many of you would be interested in, and could run, a game submitted in Mat Lab? No guarantees we would follow through with it, especially depending upon the theme next time around, but we just wanted to see if it would be worth while to try at all.

Happy Coding,

TnT

I’ve been working on a Unity integration for the Newgrounds API. Gotten communication with the Newgrounds server down and it’s mostly a matter of packaging it to make it easier for other devs to use (for scoreboards and badges); I’ve yet to get ads or Save Files up. Anyways; I’m making this post to announce that I’m making my code so far public and I’m taking a few days off from this. I need to focus on more pertinent projects for a bit. Any Unity, Javascript, Actionscript or HTML coders that want to contribute to the project. Are welcome to make a new branch on the public git. Located here.

Rest assured that regardless of if I get any further assistance, I will get the API up, except flash ads. I will take a moment to thank MSGHero, I never would have managed to format my secure posts correctly without direct access to the normal flash output, which he provided me. I’ll also thank NutCaseNightmare, though we didn’t have direct contact, his earlier work at a javascript implementation of the API was very helpful in creating this one. Several people on the Ludum Dare IRC also offered assistance when I couldn’t find the proper functions to call in Unity (and with my complete ignorance to the proper way to format the HTML/CSS/Javascript interactions on the outside.) Thanks guys.

Anyways; I’ll be working on actual paperwork and getting my own site up for a bit; then finish this and work on a serious game that will use it. I offer it publicly in the full hope that I attract more Unity-developers to Newgrounds. If you want to use the early version and need help understanding what is implemented; just message me. In this case; I’d prefer contact be to my Newgrounds…which I only got because of LD28. hehe.

Introducing: Sandwich Joe Saga – Escape from Candy World!

Genre- Platformer/Puzzle

Joe, the owner of the local deli, finds a golden ticket in a candy bar, saying he has won a free vacation in Candy World. Before he knows what’s happened, he’s teleported to a whimsical world made entirely of sweets! Not surprisingly he longs for real food and attempts to make his escape.

This was made in about 2 weeks in Processing and me and my friend Gan spent all last afternoon porting it to Google Dart so it would run better in a browser. It was worth it, too. The framerate is so much smoother. But I still haven’t got it to upload properly on itch.io… Try it out, but be warned, the last few levels get hard.

http://gamemakersgarage.com/SandwichJoeSaga/sandwitchjoesaga.html

I just about managed to get something done for Candy Jam, the graphics are horrible but everything else works OK.  Just wanted to support the cause really, anyway give it a try here if you’re interested.  Thanks!
http://seconddimension.itch.io/the-abstract-candy-saga

Managed to squeeze in a game for the Candy Jam!

Its a pretty simple endless runner where you play a kid trying to escape the Candyman!

http://villafin.itch.io/candyman

Tags: candyjam

Check out my very simple and short, but hopefully at least a little fun candyjam game.

http://erkberg.itch.io/the-true-candynator-saga-in-space

Tags: candyjam

This was a pretty fun jam and it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for ridiculous trademark laws!

Thanks king!

CANDY SCROLL JUSTICE SAGA tm

Tags: Candy Jam

(I put this text on Ludum Dare because I have no where else or better place to put it. This, in my opinion, also matters to everyone here.)

We who made (and still make) games for #candyjam do it because trademark law and predatory companies are stealing our language and robbing us of our freedom of speech. It is horrifying that common words can be stolen.

I make computer games in my spare time as a way to express myself and to contribute to culture. I do it because I find computer games important as it is one of the most prominent forms of art and entertainment of our times. It is a young form of expression in which there’s still much room to explore and invent. If even I, as a hobbyist, can’t make games without the risk of legal harassment, then there is something very corrupt in how we’ve organized our societies. I believe that laws are only valid when they serve the people and not by their own right. The use of trademark and copyright law to effectively censor culture voids their validity. Even more troublesome is the fact that most major internet infrastructures are located in the US, their laws have practically become international. For us who live outside the US, the right to participate in and produce cultural expressions on the internet (even freedom of speech) is outside democratic control. Instead these rights are, for all practical purposes, controlled by a few powerful companies who don’t understand and have no incentive to care about the gravity of what they are doing
This state of affairs is simply unacceptable.

Yesterday, there was an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on reddit, and unfortunately the discussion derailed into legal matters. I think this left quite a few of us disappointed. Not in the fantastic people who make #candyjam possible, but in the outcome of the AMA. For sure, the legal risks may be relevant to discuss, but they are not as important as the fact that we are making these games. Or why we make them!

If you’ve read this far, chances are this matters to you too. There are some ways for you to show this:

• Make a #candyjam game if you already haven’t — you have all week before submissions finally close. I know you want to!
• If you made a game, cast a vote or write a comment on someone elses game on itch.io to let them know what you think.
• Play a game or spread the word (since most or all of us have yet to get a single dollar from all our game making efforts, we measure our worth in page views, clicks and links)
• Let the people who put this impromptu jam together know how much you appreciate them on twitter. (#candyjam)
• And finally, when the next Ludum Dare swings around, I expect all of you to have some candy in your game!

Cheers,
Local Minimum

The Candy Jam just seemed like a really good reason to make a game.

Originally, I had planned to just change a project I already had in the works to include candy… but that felt too easy. I wanted a little more challenge than that. I wanted to be much more sophisticated and experimental in my trolling.

So, I made a game about being a game developer that sues other developers for trademark infringement and also develops copycats of other successful games. You can play the end result at the link below. I hope you all enjoy it!

King of All the Candies

Tags: Candy Jam, candyjam

Aww sugar I just made an awesome game for a little thing called the candy jam.
http://itch.io/jam/candyjam Oh the injustice that this actually needs to exist but it gave me an excuse to make a lil game with a good friend helping with the art.

Great working with you max I hope you enjoyed yourself too. Please support the cause. Give my game and maybe some of the others a go.

http://boaheck.itch.io/candy-rush-saga

Here’s the logo

I’ve decided to work on a post compo version of my LD28 game with more features. I’m currently working on the first level boss. Here is a WIP video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJImvpUAY8k

I barely make posts here on Ludum Dare but I am planning on making a new game in the old, rusty and dirty piece of s*it “Batch”. If you don’t know what batch is. It’s pretty much a scripting language made for the old DOS operating system created by Microsoft.

I guess its no good for making graphical games. But I guess it will do for a good ole’ text adventure game. My new project is called “Spacecraft”. Its not what you think it is. Infact it has barely anything to do with spacecraft. Or space in that matter. Pretty much the game “Minecraft” the hit wonder. Re-created in the batch programming language. It seems pretty promising at the moment, although my will power is never good enough to carry a game past about a couple of weeks.

Here is a quick screenie of the code below:

And here is another screenie of the game:

As you can see it is only the starting screen and the world selector that is done at the moment. Although I just feel that this is a very promising project and will work hard on it for a bit of a while.

Thanks for reading this very rare post from me.

-James Foley(That programming dude).

The path finding subroutine for the woman and guard characters works well. The woman will always choose the path that ignoring directly turning around which will lead farthest away from the player in the next tile. The guard will always choose the path that ignoring directly turning around which will lead closest to the character in the next tile.

This is a nice proof of concept video showing actual working code. There will likely be a release of prototype version update this weekend. Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments below.

This was cross-posted from my development blog at wally2069.blogspot.com

This entry was posted on Friday, February 7th, 2014 at 1:06 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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’ve finally finished making the full version of Javel-ein, the game I submitted for Ludum Dare #28. You can find the original Ludum Dare page here. The full version has 60 improved levels, four chapters each with optional collectibles and a unique boss, music, a story, a timer, and many, many small fixes. 

Download and play the full version!

More information here!

As always, I hope you enjoy the game!

Come watch!

http://www.twitch.tv/endesga

-Seth

Language: C
Library: SDL 2.0.X

See you there in Ludum Dare #29!

This version has two guards that try to intercept the player before they reach the princess. The first guard always chooses the path leading to the player. The second guard always chooses the path leading to the maiden.

Each guard is going to be given a unique decision routing algorithm to prevent the player from stacking multiple guards in the same spot.

Another change is removing the set number of levels in favor of a go for the high score style of gameplay. Catching a maiden earns points and sends the player to the next stage. Getting caught by a guard ends the run taking the player to the final score screen.

Still working on a number of changes towards making this game a complete project. Everyone is welcome to leave feedback in the comments section below.

This was cross-posted from my development blog at wally2069.blogspot.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 8th, 2014 at 12:03 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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!

I made a very simple 3d game in unity. Here is what it looks like:

You can play it here: http://bashcode.co.nf/   (it uses Unity Player)

Please tell me what you think of it

Natanijel

Well, it’s time to kick off Year 12 and do some scheduling!

See, I typically try doing this on Twitter, which is notoriously bad for being a stream that people miss. So for a change, I’ve decided to do something sensible: make a post about it here on the website. How novel?

Tentative Date: April 25th-28th Weekend

I like to schedule events as late as possible in the month, and best I can tell, there are two very good reasons to prefer the last weekend of April.

• April 4th-7th Weekend
• Really Early Sadface
• April 11-14 Weekend
• PAX East (Major Gaming Convention) – Boston, MA
• April 18-21 Weekend
• Revision (Demo Party, formerly BreakPoint) – Saarbrücken, Germany
• April 25-28 Weekend
• I LIKE THIS ONE

If I’ve missed any other major game industry related events, let me know in the comments.

Being a coder and C64 Geek, I’m a total DemoScene nerd. Between Revision and Assembly (Summer), there’s really not much left. I’d hate to miss watching the live streams (yet again).

PAX East, I’ve actually exhibited at. Boston is a lovely city, with a wonderful gamedev community. I’m not attending this year, but I’m sure I will attend again soon. Plus the locals would kill me.

So that’s my 2 cents. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, or to let me know of other very important things happening certain weeks. Thanks!

Xeewolf Screenshot

Xeewolf my humble homage to the classic Zeewolf try it on Kongregate

Tags: unity3d, Xeewolf, Zeewolf

Same as above

Hello!
We have finally released new gameplay (with dev. commentary) of our new project that was inspired by my  LD27 game called  Project: “Explosion”

You can check it on this link (bottom of the page): LINK
Make sure to let me know what do you think about it!

Hey Guys,

Gyro Clone , This  is the clone of the android game Gyro that am working on.Check it out.

Tags: casual, clone, gyro

Hey People , Two Player Chess  is a two player chess game made over last weekend, check it out!!

Tags: chess, multiplayer, two player

For me, LD28 was the best Ludum Dare I’ve had. Even though it was about 2 months ago, I’ve only just got round to putting the post-compo finishing touches onto my game. I ended up building a game, Glide, which I’d had the idea of for a while. Sadly I’m fairly unmotivated at the best of times, but Ludum Dare is always capable of getting me into action!

What is Glide?

The basic premise is that you use the single control (spacebar) to switch “gravity” on and off. Technically it’s not quite an implementation of gravity, but we’ll get to that. The game only has ten levels at the moment – this was partially due to timing constraints during LD28, and partly due to my inability to come up with new levels – but most of all, it seems that hardly anybody actually plays through to the end of the game anyway.

What went right?

• The aesthetic – I was incredibly happy with how the look and feel of the game turned out. Despite some lag issues on Firefox and on slow browsers, play seemed to be generally quite smooth. Feedback assures me that the way the game played was consistent and this helped it to stay fun.

• The idea – For once, I was actually able to reap the benefits of a Ludum Dare idea which was easy to implement. I cannot overstate how useful this was in enabling me to create what I feel is a “good” game during the short amount of time available. I knew I was in with a hope when the raw game was almost completely implemented by the end of Saturday night.

• The fun – I think this is without a doubt the only LD entry which I can confidently say was actually fun to play. For me at least. I think this was in part down to the learnability of  the controls – After a few goes it is actually possible to complete some of the more difficult levels, and it doesn’t just feel like trial and error. (An exception to this being “TWITCH”.)

What went wrong?

• The curve – I have heard from quite a few people that the difficulty curve was way off. I think this can be put down to the fact that I have little experience in level design, almost all of my previous games having been arcade-style procedurally generated gameplay, rather than pre-built levels. More time would have enabled some more detailed level design and if I build more levels then this is certainly something that I will take into account.

• The assets – The lack of music in the game felt a little off and it’s possible this is one of the reasons many people didn’t stick around in the game. Since the compo has ended I’ve added some fantastic music from the equally fantastic Kevin McLeod, and it’s improved the aesthetic greatly.

• The name – I should have absolutely checked that the name Glide was available on my Flash portal of choice (Kongregate) before embarking. Sadly, it was taken, and so I’ve had to release under the name GraviGlide on Kongregate.

Overall

All in all, I’m really happy with how Glide turned out. If anybody feels like giving it a go (and I’m still incredibly open to constructive criticism), and/or giving it a fair rating, I’d be more than chuffed! You can find it here.

I’m in the process of slowly moving out of my comfort zone, and try to learn to make games without Flash. Flash has had its moments, but the port to mobile is getting really clunky and impractical.

So, the obvious choice would be Unity, as it seems to grow in popularity and has the advantage of being cross platform. But I was also considering another option: Cocos2D JS

I’ve read some tutorials, and it seems like a nice concept: I make a game in JavaScript, make it work within the browser, then port it nicely to iOS and Android. But there some issues with it I could think of:
#1. Well… it’s not clear but… is this developed by Zynga? ;-P
#2. The IDE of choice seems to be cocosbuilder.com, and at the top of the page it says Cocos Builder is no longer maintained. (then it redirects me to SpriteBuider.com). Does it look like a red flag?
#3. Isn’t JavaScript slow?

The reason I’m not completely sold on Unity, is because I’m mostly a 2D game developer, and I would prefer something a little more lightweight. Unity seems to be for the kind of devs who like to incorporate APIs, engines. I’m the kind of dev who’d rather implement basic collision detection than use a physics engine in my game.

Anyway, just looking for other dev’s thoughts about it. Thanks

Tags: cocos2D, cocos2d-javascript

So myself I don’t really make 8-bit games, but I know a lot of you guys do. There’s one thing I would love to see more in your 8-bit retro games: CUTSCENES!

And I found the perfect tool to help you achieve that ;-). It’s an online tool (no download) found here: http://c64.superdefault.com/

I encountered this site when I was looking for a PNG to 8-bit retro converter. The naive approach was to scale a picture down, save it, then scale it up to make it look pixelated. That actually failed big time, simply because the result was too rich in color. It clearly looked like a scaled up photo rather than a retro graphic. There are a few tutorials that showed how to do it right using photoshop, but for the lazy type like me, I found that the online tool works best! Just look at this awesome 8-bit photo of Nicolas Cage below!

Tags: 8-bit, gamedev, nicolas cage, retro, tools

Have you seen AutoTileGen? It’s a useful-looking tool that will let its users generate tilesets from just a few images. It’s not coming out until April. Note that that is in time for LD29. It’s got an IndieGoGo campaign going, you can contribute to that here and, as perks, get a license when it comes out for $25-50 or early access for $120.

If you can’t wait or you can’t afford it for $25, though, I’ve written an alternative tool in Java, called GoTile. It’s free and it’s got a GPL version 3 license – its source code is here. I made the great majority of it in just 2 days. I think it works pretty well, but expect AutoTileGen to have less bugs, more features, and a better interface. You should be able to figure most of it out by messing with it, but custom levels should be CSVs and masks should be solid white in the shape of a tile. Here’s a screenshot, the GUI shows most of the features.

GoTile at its most show-offy.

EDIT: There have been a few updates to the program since I made this post, so I updated the screenshot. Make sure to get the new version, too – I added some good stuff.

Tags: autotilegen, gotile, tile set, tiles, tileset, tool, tools

Download – Incomplete Soul v4

This was cross-posted from my development blog at wally2069.blogspot.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2014 at 1:06 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.

Today, lonebot.net is officially turning one year old!

I wanted to post this here because without Ludum Dare, there wouldn’t be Lonebot. So thanks a lot everybody! I think we’ve come a very long way since we launched our website

Here’s a cool video Mati made about our games:

So what does the future hold? Hopefully, not potatoes.

Thanks so much for everything, Ludum Dare!

I continually working on my LD28 submission, which was “You can only get peace” an experimental  game about meditation, and plan to distribute when the time come. It had a name change to “Get your peace”. If you intersted in future update about, you can find on the project newly created indiedb page here.

Just to say I’m Innnnnnnnnnn, and post my usual sexy photo

you can see/follow my other games:
http://www.mamoniem.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mamoniemworks
https://twitter.com/MuhammadAMoniem
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBBcKlWecOLdywouiZPGkgg

m;

You are stuck in a universe full of war, terror and hazard. You have been sent on a mission of Recon, to see if you can find any survivors. You jump into hyperspace but something goes wrong. The dials and buttons are flashing red…

Read more & play the game here.

21st to Monday 24th 23:59 of February (in your timezone) (FINISHED!)

Theme

• Non-human player

Rules

• You can work alone or in a team.
• You can use previously created assets.
• You can do it in your timezone. (21st-24th of feb)
• Have fun.

Non-human player, is the player a crow, a fish, a trap, an arrow, an apple, a monster, an obelisk, a droid or maybe a creature disguised as a player? Use the theme as you want, try to make something cool. You can make an artsy game (a flower?), a mechanic driven game (a bird?) or maybe a sound driven game (a bat?).

[ View ]

I made a mock up poster for ludum dare 29 for a pirate theme

You know you all want pirates as the theme

Hey LD community,

some of you may know, that I’m currently working on a project called “Game Jam Management System”. As the name implies it’s supposed to make hosting game jams simple and accessible to everyone!

And now I need some help from all the game jammers out there.´
For the website I’ll create for it, I’ll need screenshots of game jam games to use in the head slider. So if you want to have your game jam game shown (including credits, i.e. mention of name and link to website) go here and submit a screenshot!

Ideally your screenshot should have a width of 900px or more. The height doesn’t matter much.

Thanks for your help!
– Folis

While Ludum Dare is typically an online event (make a game from the comfort of your home), many real world events happen around Ludum Dare. Here’s the list:

• Portland, Oregon – Portland Indie Game Squad (pigsquad.com)
• Longmont, Colorado – Tinkermill (Tinkermill.org)
• Brazil – “Online” Ludum Dare Gogogo
• Paris, France – Ludum Dare Paris (Meetup.com)
• Lund, Sweden – at Sony sonymobile.com/hackathon (was Malmö, post)
• Calgary, Alberta – Meetup.com (hi!)
• San Francisco, California – The MADE
• Falmouth, UK – 8-bit Bar
• Minsk, Belarus – MZOR/Techspace
• Lausanne, Switzerland – FIXME Hackerspace
• Enschede, Netherlands – University of Twente **
• Richmond, Virgina – RVA Game Jams
• Aarhus, Denmark – Aarhus
• Mannheim, Germany – RaumZeitLabor
• Los Angeles, California – CrashSpace
• Omsk, Russia – Omsk Ludum Dare
• Knoxville, Tennessee – Technology Cooperative
• Adelaide, Australia – Jamalaide
• Hamburg, Germany – InnoGames HQ
• Johannesburg, South Africa – MakeGamesSA at Microsoft Campus
• Charlotte, North Carolina – IGDA Charlotte at Microsoft Campus
• Lexington, Kentucky – Super Soul
• Rochester, New York – Rochester Indies Anonymous at RedBottle Design
• Coventry, United Kingdom – Warwick Game Design at University of Warwick
• Bandung, Indonesia – Institut Teknologi Bandung
• Brisbane, Australia – Eastes
• Miðfjörður, Iceland – Isolation Game Jam
• Chicago, Illinois – Looseleaf Lounge
• Skopje, Macedonia – Hacklab KIKA
• Eugene, Oregon – FertiLab
• Oslo, Norway – Bitraf
• Tokyo, Japan – Pico Pico Cafe

If you want your event on the list, post a comment letting me know where your event is. Be sure to include a link to further details (either here on the blog, or elsewhere).

I have made a free background music.

You can use it in your game if you want.

License = CC 3.0 Attribution only

What better way to celebrate your birthday than by crunching some goodie-goodie-game for a MiniLD?!

I would also love to promote a new game engine! It’s called the Furnace Engine and it’s similar to increpare’s PuzzleScript, but is more focused on creating Minecraft-like games where you mine and build and use inventory items on the environment.

If you feel brave and this sounds interesting give it a try:  http://madflame991.github.io/furnace-engine/src/
See those little flowers? They are ANIMATED!

Furnace Engine

Hi everyone !

I got some interesting ideas for this mini compo ! I work on the HTML5 part and my teammate works on the music.

The only problem is the graphic part :c
I must admit that the pixel art I did isn’t really convincing ! So if you’re interested in creating some tiles, contact me 😀

temporary tiles

EDIT 2: Thanks for all the help, guys 😀

EDIT: No longer accepting entries but feel free to read anyways.

I am in need of music for my game and I cannot compose to save my life.

I am making a space themed game for the Mini LD and I need some music.

Here is the concept:

The music needs to feel like you are floating through lifeless space, it needs to loop.

Contact me at theupgradezone@live.com or @theupgradezone for twitter

You shall be credited!

Thanks a lot

The Running Dead is a small game with a high difficulty gameplay on you run to survive from zombies.

To survive you can shoot and jump(or double jump) to avoid the various type of zombies including birds and wolfs(And maybe i add some piranhas)

The GFX are simply dots of 8×8 using a pallete of non-saturated colors all to get the most possible “real” looking for this resolution/style.

Title screen:

Gameplay .Gif:

Actually the game runs at:
Windows, Mac, Linux, Flash, Android, iOS(iPod, iPhone, iPad) and OUYA.

The overall progress is around 60-70% ans is planned to be released on next month, first on mobiles i guess and later on ouya/deskptop.

Links you maybe interested:

Tumblr with the last updates:  http://dev.kronbits.com/

Tigsource Thread:  http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38878.0

GameJolt Page:  http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/the-running-dead/22793/

Kronbits Official Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Kronbits

Personal Twitter:  https://twitter.com/DavitMasia

Half an hour till compo with absolutely no ideas what so ever!

Tools:
Language >> AS3
Engine >> Flashpunk
Art >> ASEprite / Paint.Net
Music >> PXtone
Levels >> Ogmo Editor

Good luck and I hope to have fun!

So I’ve spent the first 2 hours coding the first screen to my game. In that time, I decided what my game was gonna be like. I will not reveal what the gameplay is like yet, but to hint, it’s rather similar to Wasteland Kings, which is now known as Nuclear Throne!

I’m trying my first Ludum Dare as the MiniLD that’s starting today! I’m only a high school student, so I don’t expect to do too well, but I’m only doing this to improve my knowledge! Good luck to everyone, and I hope you all have a great time!