LD29 April 25–28, 2014

Not The Elephant Screenshot

It’s kind of sad how close this is to final graphics!

Screen shot 2014-04-26 at 10.49.49 AM

Next up is getting some example ballistics code to work, so you get those nice arcs when you chuck stuff, like in that iOS game that I’m totally ripping off here.  I just might actually finish this!

Mission Beneath The Surface : update day 1

ld48

Key pickup!!

This is my first time making a game with Unity,  slow progress as I expected but I’m having fun learning and making!!

It’s after midnight in Japan so I’m going to sleep for a few hours. See you guys later!!

x_x

output_11VMv6

 

output_dMaH17

Animation is the most painful part of my life right now.

ZZzzzz…..

I’m up for 15 hours without coffee I am tired but today ( next 6 hours) I won’t sleep and won’t drink coffee!

(I never drink coffee)

Hold on!
Good luck!

Screenshots of caves

Day 1 is almost complete. I am creating a cave exploration game, so here are some screenshots of the caves.

ld29_1

ld29_2

ld29_3

 

Tomorrow I will create the actual levels of the game and implement more game mechanics. I hope there will be enough time for some sound too.

I’m in

I’m late but I’m in. I have only few hours free this weekend so I will make a simple game.

I think i’m going to do a city builder that take place in the underground ocean of Europa (a Jupiter Moon). That’s my most orinigal idea (beacause mining games or cave exploring games aren’t ).

No Sleep Till Brooklyn: Manta Ray Edition

Living on the edge as we all do, my game jam partner and I kicked off Ludum with three drinks and the sinking realization that maybe picking my bad idea to work on wasn’t such a great one: ocean meshes are hard.

Somewhere around 6am, I went to sleep for a little bit so I could avoid the worst part of the hangover — your mouth is cotton, the world is vicious stabbing sunlight — and woke up to this.

Keith looks back at me over his shoulder: “Game’s done.”

Gun Wo I

Hello everyone,

We (@mlociara & @vigrid) making a jam game and wanted to share some progress:

gunwo1

It’s not much, but this will be the best game ever (really)!

Live stream at: http://www.twitch.tv/vigridzki

Playable

After wasting lots of time on chrome compatibility (now I know how to make it chrome compatible, but that will probably a post-competition port), I’ve got a playable build for firefox up at http://frozensummer.uni.me/

The build has the visual novel + crossword mechanics I planned, but it’s only the standard plot. Now I can focus on writing the hidden plot (which is Beneath The Surface…), and making some more sounds and graphics.

screenshot03

#SAVINGGRACE

It’s my first ever Ludum Dare and upon announcement of the subject, my mind was flooded with underwater and below the ground games.

Not content with just doing one of these, I slept on it and #savinggrace was born. It takes a unique stance, and is also a game aimed at kids which is about looking beneath the surface of one’s mind.

Concept 2 !

tunnel_02

Kraken pool party!

Beneath the surface, the Kraken awakens!

We’re making a party game where each player controls a different tentacle of the Kraken. So basically we’re ripping off Crawl hardcore 😉 Also Death Worm. Only it’s multiplayer so it’s cool.

The game will probably look absolutely nothing like this (click to zoom):

Kraken pool party, a party game about krakens and parties.

Kraken pool party, a party game about krakens and parties.

The Kraken can block projectiles and smash ships, and move itself around my grabbing the sea floor. It can also pick up animals and sailors and put them in its gaping maw of death!

 

 

We’re using Unity 3D because we’re lazy.

Tags: crawl, death worm, kraken, NaturalPad, party, Pool, powerhoof, wilbefast

Comments

01F0
26. Apr 2014 · 14:13 UTC
This looks epic! Can’t wait to try it out 😀

My player sprite…

Drillman

 

He really, really wants to go to China.

I’m in trouble

This is my first time joining a game jam .

Now it seems that I can’t even finish it. Unity, my tool of choice, decided to crash for no appaernt reason other than dragging a script onto an gameobject in my scene. Oh well. Tried restarting Unity. It crashed on launch. No worries I made a back-up at some point. Nope. All my projects crash instantly. Sigh…

Comments

skppo
26. Apr 2014 · 15:48 UTC
It seems that this was a system problem and affected other programs too. Restart fixed it. Should’ve tried that earlier.

hah!

Destroy your fears!

Some kind of progress \o/

the short story:
you are a doctor who can destroy somebodies fears by rewiring his/hers brain (inception like)

play it here: http://www.lobsterlove.de/ld29 (html5/js – phaser framework)

next task: replace placeholder gfx /o\

FearWire

 

play it here: http://www.lobsterlove.de/ld29

 

 

 

We’re in! Loch Ness / Lake Monster Puzzle Thing.

Even though I just finished a tool for making poker cards, my wife Diana wanted to participate in this Ludum Dare and learn how to use Unity. Last night we brainstormed ideas.

Rejected ideas:

  • you’re a cave dweller lady who can only survive in the sun for a few moments. you have to run out and snatch men and take them back underground to your cave harem
  • there are monsters under your bed and you have to trick them into coming out
  • you’re a washing machine and you steal socks

What we’re going with:

You’re the Loch Ness monster, but not the dinosaur one that everyone thinks you are. Something more tentacle-y. Your goal is to avoid detection by sonar boats and submarines, sneak a tentacle up to the surface, and snatch tourists.

Thinking we’ll do it puzzle-game style, where each level has a set number of tourists to grab and a set number of patrolling enemies.

Photo on 4-26-14 at 11.05 AM

 

This morning so far I’ve gotten her set up on github and Unity and we’re about to start working on the tentacle prototype.

 

Screen Shot 2014-04-26 at 11.00.45 AM

 

Tools:

  • Unity
  • Photoshop for me, Krita for Diana
  • (maybe Flash, thinking we won’t need animation, though)
  • Glyph Designer
  • Texture Packer

 

Challenge accepted


I want 25 level for my game, 2 is ready:


 

The curse of building a game engine from scratch

Call me crazy, but I do prefer building my own frameworks from the ground up.

Now this is all fine and well… unless you only start coding the framework three hours before Theme Announcement.

But perseverance prevails and we can show you the first screenshot of development. It’s just Asteroid-style movement at the moment but more exciting features can finally start being added :)

screen1

Attack animation!

There IS going to be blood. 😀

Attack

Uh Oh

More than 5 hours into this project and I am STILL in the middle of writing the game design document! Is it possible for a theme to be too good? I’ve went through dozens of ideas and it feels like I keep on having a better idea OR feel some weird need to completely change the core game mechanics.

On the positive side, after doing game development for a little over a year I think I have finally nailed down a workflow that works really well for me, so there’s that!

 

End of the first day

Yeah, I know, it’s just 18 : 20 in France but I have some other things to do,I end this first day with two screen:

 

A ennemy and a key:

capture4

 

And the title screen (yep, it’s simple):

 

The title screen

MOM, WE WANNA GO CHINA – Presenting a kid

Ladies and gentlemen, after working a little bit more on the Server & Client’s code, I’ve been working on the graphics, also the sprites of the 4 kids you’ll play.

Here’s one:

He’s cute, isn’t he.

Now onto putting animations on ’em, and putting them inside the game, so we can actually win something!

First Day Update

I am slowly getting somewhere, so here is a first screenshot:

ld29-2

Tags: html5, impact

Progress so far…

A little. Very little. Still, it’s something.

 

I found ocean script for unity: http://scrawkblog.com/2013/02/24/ocean-renderer-for-unity/

Scrawk, its author is a wonderful human being.

 

02

Update 2 1:56am

Added elevators!

We can now take the president below the surface!

*cough* White house down? *cough*

update 2

So far behind schedule…

So far my afternoon of programming has gone something like this:

try{

Do something

} catch (NullPointerException e){

I SAID DO SOMETHING DAMNIT

}

Ah well. At least I got graphics and all but I’ll post up something purdy once I have a properly functioning level!

I’m in. What I have got so far.

Hello, this will be my second Ludum Dare.  I already started working on my game, but i don’t really have an idea of what it will turn out to be in the end. Some kind of cave explorer. I know it’s not very creative, but i will have fun making it.

So i will be using: Java with Canvas, Paint.NET and probably sfxr for sound.

What the game looks like right now:

miner-screen-1

I hope to make a game that at least some people will enjoy.

Good luck everyone.

First progress

Yeeeeey, it starts to work properly sometimes 😀 The basic gameplay mechanics have been implemented. Let’s take the next steps :)

 

progress1

Progress?

I started working on my entry this morning I think it is going well so far.
poop You might have to click the image to view the gif.

Hacking away at security layers

steamgirl_idle_hacker_01

Due to time constraints I’m trying to make the simplest possible game. I’m aiming to make an idle/cookie-clicker game where you hack away at various layers of security. Not fleshed it out yet – trying out the organic/emergent approach this time rather than pre-planned.

More Particles!

So I am making a digging game …. with PARTICLES!

Screenshot with Particles

Particles

Good thing she remembered her laser gun

The game is coming along nicely. I’m working on the animation and weapon systems, Vidarn is coding away on the level rendering and dialog systems while Eiil is painting her ass of. We are really happy with the over all look for the moment. Feels good :)

LD29

Massive XP gains

End of the day for me. Hardly put much time in to my game – other things happened, as they do.

Nontheless, I end the day with this:

second

The skeleton is there, just time to actually make something happen! The game seems eerily dead without movement (or sound for that matter).

Gonna write a little todo list on OneNote before I get to bed.

I’m constantly amazed at the creativity and uniqueness of the stuff I’ve been seeing today. As I mentioned last time this is my first LD, so I didn’t know what to expect. I have a great appreciation for artists and their work in games, my primary skill being as a programmer.

I feel like I’m learning a lot, particularly how to prioritise things and to just get the game working, regardless of how it looks.

Looking forward to a crunch tomorrow!

– Chris

Switching Tracks

I was originally going to use Unreal 4, in order to learn it: however, it’s obvious now it’s going to take a little longer than 48 hours to learn it well enough to actually use it.

So I’m switching to HaxeFlixel; the idea I have works very well in 2D, and the Flixel library provides a ton of handy stuff. Additionally, if I’m using Haxe, I can compile to Windows, Flash, HTML5, Android and more without changing my code.

So here goes!

DO IT BECAUSE: Engine completed!!

Hey there! I’m pretty happy to announce that the engine for DO IT BECAUSE has been completed!

Also, the game now is called DO IT BECAUSE. You might have already figured that out. 😛

 

enginedone

 

Now let’s get into the actual game!

I’m livestreaming right now here:

twitch.tv/mrrosso

Tags: LD #29

Mmm scones

scones

Homemade scones, with jam and fresh cream.  Excellent motivational food.  It’s like being back in Blighty.

 

Comments

26. Apr 2014 · 14:57 UTC
those look really good.

And… The Artist is Here!

Today I awoke to meet my artist, BDNachi! Check out her work, she’s awesome!

We’re scratching a few concepts, trying to define a style for the game.

Meanwhile, I must fix some stuff with grunt and Gruntfile.js.

It’s 13:48 here, so we must hurry up!

Tags: html5, MelonJS

Path finding woes

$WindowTitle$

After fiddling with the path finding for about 3 hours (and it still doesn’t work as intended!) we’re finally ready to go on producing some content. :)

New stuff!

Menu

The city is alive!

Inside of a house

The artist is in the house! Progress report

DSCN1317 copy

The amazing noc. just arrived and starting working on the “cut-scenes” art!
We are making good progress, the goal is clear and the gameplay is pretty well defined. Lots of room for improvement, but for now we need to get a playable version as soon as possible.
Hope everything is going all right for you guys! :)

A bit late, but we’re in!

Me and a friend will be using Unity to develop. This is our first time using Unity, so I’m not sure how well it’ll work, but I think it’ll be a heck of a lot better than the time I tried to write an engine from scratch in Java last ludum dare. We’ll be using Blender for 3d modeling, but the rest is kind of up in the air besides that.

 

We might scratch the 3d and go to 2d depending on what happens – we’ve already missed a few hours.

Darkwalker

I had this concept right away after I saw Beneath the Surface as the theme.  Below is my original story.

The final Darkwalker wasn’t always alone in his struggle, almost 1000 years ago the phenomenon occurred that turned humans into either Lightwalkers or Darkwalkers.  Now Zin is alone to fight the Lightwalkers and he needs to find a way to save the human race or perish.  There were rumors of a device that could restore the human race but without the device the Lightwalkers relentless assault to exterminate Zin will no doubt end in death and the hope for civilization to be restored vanquished.  Memories of the phenomenon are so faint now that it’s hard to remember what exactly happened.  Zin’s last memory is of Emi, a recently deceased Darkwalker, and her death after being zapped with UV light by the Lightwalkers.  Emi’s dark skin faded away bubbling from the light, releasing her life force in a violent volcanic-like eruption.  Many others have gone the same way but none more traumatic than Emi’s encounter.  The Lightwalkers’ technology has advanced further in recent time to become even more deadly.  Sunlight is the last thing Zin wants to see, this too is a faint distant memory.  The life of Zin the Darkwalker is subterranean, moving underground or during nightfall from place to place hoping the Lightwalkers do not find him to catch a breather in order to give him time to find the device to end this nightmare.

Lvl1Shell

I am using Unity, the AutoTileGen tool, Photoshop, if I’m able Spriter for animations, LMMS for music, sfxr for sound effects, and I’ll be searching for public script help but I’ll end up writing some of my own.  The picture above is the cave starting point.

 

I have no idea if I’ll be able to finish this but I’ll keep working on it even if I don’t complete it in time for #LD29.  I have a ton of artwork to do.  I wrote a song this morning but I think it still needs a little work, I’ve linked it below.

Good luck everyone!

…and out!

Between work and jam I coded from 8am to 1am yesterday. Thinking of two more days and then back to work on Monday… BARF!

Sunny day, gonna take the kid out!

Looking forward to checking out the games! GOOD LUCK!

16/48

screenie_2

 

It’s been sixteen hours, and the game’s almost finished. It’s only lacking two scenes and some sound effects.

I’m way too sleepy to do it, though. For the meantime, here’s a screenshot for ‘Beneath the Surface’. I think I really need to change that title, but nyeeaah.

A Good Night Reminder

Make a backup of all your game files NOW. Don’t do it later!

It’s a few seconds spent if nothing fails. It’s the difference between a game made and a dream shattered when it happens.

A story!

scr2

Some code running :)

 

The first version of the game loop is here. The player is red and falling and has to doge black blocks!

Screen Shot 2014-04-26 at 19.02.59

Back 2 Work

added collision detection, bullets and a camera shake … lots more to do .. so little time
4

update #3 day 2 GO

Had a good sleep. Got  some  Dark Souls II in me. Ready to code for 12 hours.

There haven’t been many games with PROPER welding in them, I might try to incorporate?

>>STREAM<<

So I thought I join the compo and take it as an opportunity to learn more about box2d and box2d lights and hope that I can reuse some of the code from here for my other projects. Also I wanted to retry on my idea of cellular warfare in the deep ocean, which I already tried to do for LD25 I think 😉 I don’t have the full weekend to work on this, so I hope I get something small running…

Haven’t done very much yet, just some small setup with stage and world with libgdx, done some graphics and rendering it.

Diamond Diggers

Hi there.

I’m making a diamond digging game, which you can play with your friends in splitscreen :)

mole-cave-mp

MTG Prerelease was this weekend.

Title pretty much says it all.
I was already at the shop by the time LD started.
Just woke up from a nap.

My progress? I have absolutely nothing planned or coded.
Is it worth spending the time to do the compo/jam?

Comments

themisfit25
26. Apr 2014 · 15:25 UTC
Same here, I’m about 12 hours behind where I would want to be D:

Wow, a lot of people are posting some promising looking games!

This theme might turn out to produce some awesome games. As for me I’m hopeful for my game, last night I coded a basic platformer in unity, now time to code the main mechanic, and try to produce art even though I’m really bad at art.

Keep up the great work everybody, there are several games I’m excited to play.

Control a colony of ants RTS

Still no idea how I’ll incorporate RTS elements, this will be interesting

Comments

26. Apr 2014 · 15:20 UTC
TyrAnt is a RTS Ant Colony game I saw at Games For Change 14, you might be able to draw some inspiration from there.

Waffletime update!

So my girlfriend dropped by bearing gifts of waffley wonder just as I finished figuring out how to properly convert a video to a GIF in GIMP.

The waffles in question. They are encrusted in maple goodness.

So I had intended to spend some time writing a proper story,  but I fear I do not have time to implement the complex idea I had initially. It’d take 48 hours to just get all of it out of my head clearly. So, I switched things up a bit, and hopefully the game will not suffer too much for it.

To make up for my low morale upon scrapping the narrative, I implemented some of the tweening I was saving for the last day.

Ahh… That’s refreshing. Sorry for the large GIF size. I had planned to host on gfycat, but I can’t seem to embed the video on the LD page. Darn.

I’m pretty proud of this for dev art… My artist is on a flight back from NYC as we speak, and hopefully she’ll be able to hop in tomorrow and take my visuals to the next level.

 

If you’re interested in my shenanigans, hit me up on my stream: http://twitch.tv/cashewdev/

 

Satan appears

First time participating in Ludum Dare, the theme idea is pretty good, I’m impressed with the level of creativity people have.

I’m working on a platformer on which you’ll get to play as Satan himself… Pentagrams, hell, monsters, demons, fire, lava, all the cool stuff. All of this while listening to some death metal among other things is sun.

I’m streaming right here if you feel like joining http://www.twitch.tv/davidc02

Also @davidmoron on Twitter.

Here’s a screenshot \m/ — everything is a place holder right now, someone on my stream suggested I started using google’d sprites instead of cubes to get more inspiration, and if Doom doesn’t inspire “Hell” stuff, then what does? haha

Tags: ld29

Scuba Sam Progress Report 3 -Pure Java-

Hey! Scuba Sam is starting to get there now. There is now background music, and different levels (took forever to get to almost work) and a bit of bug fixes. Anyways, here is a screenshot!

(Click on the picture for full quality)

LudumDare Progress 3

Weird experiments with fluids and life

I don’t have much time to participate in Ludum Dare this time around, so I’m going to do a solo submission. And it’s also going to be a very weird, little experiment… but fun to make! Here’s what I’ve came up with so far (click to see the animation):

An experiment with fluids and life

An experiment with fluids and life

I wanted to see if I could make a realistic-yet-cheap fluid simulation, and after doing a bit of research I’ve managed to do it. So, the only thing left to add is, of course… LIFE!

See you tomorrow for more updates on my weird little simulator.

Update

This is the game so far. Added the platforming  jumpy thing. And collision(works pretty well but not perfect just yet)

8e7gz

Am I awake?

I think I got 4 hours of sleep last night… I feel like a zombie, but at least I’m having fun

Posted this video this morning

Yea I’m still hungry… don’t think I’ve eaten yet today. My artwork is starting to show it too. It’s morphed into some restaurant theme. I think I can make it tie into what I’m doing. Might have something to do with beneath the surface too…

Might be time for an energy drink

 

Progress.

Things are slowly making progress. Struggling learning phaser while trying to make a game at the same time, but its a fun challenge and I think I can do something pretty good with this.

Next time I check in I will add in some pictures.

 

-Ludusamo

First pic

It seems it is my curse to always create terrible graphics.

ALWAYS
Screenshot 2014-04-26 10.18.28

Comments

26. Apr 2014 · 16:05 UTC
Hahha, don’t you worry! My graphics will be even worse :3

Maybe I should go make a short blog too…

Update #2

This time around, I’m not updating as much as I used to… I think that’s because I’m in the zone and I don’t want to stop for anything…

Anyway, progress of the last hours was very good… The ship moves around, explodes if it collides too much, all of it affected by gravity and density of the gas…

screen03

There’s mineral clusters floating in the atmosphere, you can now grab those, which will be used to gain experience and to make repairs.

screen04

According to my development plan, I’m 20 minutes behind schedule, which isn’t bad… Smile

Next step: landing, repairs and start on the “currents”…

So Much Boilerplate

I didn’t get any significant coding done last night but the idea started to come together. This morning I’ve spent most of my time putting together framework and UI so that I can get on to the fun stuff.

It doesn’t look like much but most of the boring but necessary work is done.

The most significant part is what you can't see.

Lunch time!

No text, just images for all the lazy people out there!

IMAG0005 Screenshot from 2014-04-26 19:22:16

 

Progress gifs!

Badly colored because of the format.

 

Just started

I just started a few minutes ago. What I have so far, is a rectangle that lerps to a desired velocity when you press the arrow keys. Innovation. Innovation. Innovation!

 

You can't see it, but it lerps!

You can’t see it, but it lerps!

Starting now!

I’m still deciding between two very different ideas, but I’m finally in front of a computer after a long day out and about. Here we go!

Need to change the tree colours a bit . . .

Not that the players will have much of a chance to look at it. This stuff appears at the beginning of the game to provide contrast and then isn’t really seen again. Perhaps I’ve misplaced some time, but hey.

GOLD!

screen_gold

We found gold! Now we have 3 floors.

Tags: gold, ld29, level

Done! (SkinDeep)

I didn’t get too much time as I’m super-busy working on Super Distro Horizons, but I wanted to enter and I had a quick go.

The project is called SkinDeep, you can try it out here!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34256

Thanks for taking a look guys ‘n gals!

 

Progress update 01

So casual.

So casual.

Getting better. Right-side code is mostly done, though the text-box is still useless.

Back to the drawing board. I’ve no idea what to do with the left side just yet.

Tags: progress, update

Newcomer here!

Hi there!

It’s my first time competing at LD48 so I’m not really confident that I might make it on time (Jam, maybe?) but sure as hell I’m going to try! :)

Only spent a few hours on the game so far, but things are starting to take shape:

Beneath the surface

 

Good luck everybody!

 

WINO: We’ve got characters

TheWiners

We’ve created our character roster for our game Wino!

The digger is modeled after Pres. Nixon and the Engineer kinda looks like Shaggy + Hempuli

These are the tentative stats:

Engineer:
-Can build pipe
-Can build beacon
-Can build bin
-Stores least amount of wine
-Can hold most metal

Winer:
-Can store the most wine
-Fast moving
-Can slowly sap the enemy of their wine

Digger:
-Digs quickly

Prospector:
-Can locate wine
-Slowest digger

The basic network “engine” is in place and we’re ready to start pumping out actual gameplay.

Awake again, time to continue. Results from last night.

So awake again, time to resume. Last night I basically got character sprites and music done. However, liking how it’s coming out. My game stars a character I am tentatively calling ‘Marshmallow Monk’, and an antagonistic spider who can possess different things. The character is escaping death row and is taking to the underground… But  also using the theme in a secondary, more psychological way outside of the obvious.

 

Simply drawn sprites for Marshmallow Monk & Raspberry Spider:

MC$Gooey Abomination

 

And completed 16 music tracks, which is admittedly what most of what the first few hours consisted of. Here are a few samples:

My Little Marshmallow

Underground Drone

Crystallize

Circus

Skull

Stepping in Goop

Gooey Abomination

 

Along with 9 other songs. Very odd music, but the game is odd so hope it works.

 

Also, not in the game obviously, but some people in the stream I’ve been holding have been doodling Marshmallow Monk, so I’m happy. Credit here to CookieCyatt & Xenobladebuster:

5968270fea3b84c426a123234419f3282d57a1d607fdf85959afa6f34d63ba75

 

Tags: ludum dare 29, Marshmallow

Case of…/Cases/Whatever – awesome gif showing what’s done

Well, not really. We have finished whole system behind the game (which is about solving a murder mystery) – I mean you can talk to all the people, ask them questions about where were they etc, but all of these things are made in text-only mode and are yet to be modified to work with graphical version of the game.

But we do already have walking character (he is not really finished yet although) on a few awesome backgrounds.

It’s much smoother in-game :)

beneath the surface… of the sun!

No internet and no computer access first day of ludum dare… Great start! At least I had time to come up with ideas on paper.. Ever wondered what it’s like beneath the surface of the sun? What makes it hot, but not too hot? And why it doesn’t just fry us all? What would happen if the sun cools down too much? That’s what I’m working on..

First scribbles

First scribbles

Oh framework

Man! I waste so much time updating my framework to add new core functionality, when I should be building the game. My base code doesn’t handle nested position/scope very well, but ?!@$*! this isn’t the time to be fixing that! Gotta get back on target…

Comments

26. Apr 2014 · 15:48 UTC
I know how you feel! In the same boat at the moment.

Game is functional but not FUN

So far so good.  I aimed for a super simple scope so I would have time to iterate on the mechanics. Had something working last night and have more mechanics this morning.

It’s a simple word game where sending correct words digs into deeper layers.  Only words from the same layers can be combined.

Word-Digger! (play it here: http://mcsdwvl.github.io/worddigger/build/build.html )

layers

The problem is it’s not fun at all!  I think I need to change the basic mechanic.  Clicking letters is BORING.  Maybe I should make users select contiguous letters?  Maybe I should make a stricter time limit/moves limit?  There’s no pressure and no puzzle, so nothing is fun!  Gotta take a break, walk the dog, and try to figure out where to go from here.

“Because I have to code, I can’t help it,” said the developer.

Yo.

As mentioned in my last post, I’m making a tycoon / time management game based on Kafka’s A Hunger Artist. The theme tie-in is that the game only presents the cutesy surface to a deep dark story. I haven’t decided yet how cutesy to make it. I don’t think I can pull off Ikuhara*-level cute to fucked-up ratios, but I might try.

That bug is a metaphor for actual real-world people.

 

Anyway, it’s too early to code, so here’s an update:

Spectators now have stats and names randomly assigned from a list of Czech names. When you mouse over them, you get a summary including their names, genders, and ages, whether or not they have season passes, and whether they have specific personality traits. Also, unless someone can help me think of a better word, the trait name opposite charismatic is introverted. They describe opposite ends of a stat that affects the likelihood that that spectator drags along friends or moves other spectators to be more or less skeptical.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I replaced all the háčeked characters with their plain versions instead of spending time looking for a font that looked good in Flixel and displayed them correctly.

Ticket Sales are now counted. Units are Austro-Hungarian Krone. People can buy day tickets, season tickets, or child tickets. You cannot currently change ticket prices, but that’s something I might implement later.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I made some effort to calculate the exchange rate between 1908 Krone and 2014 USD so I could get a sense of how much tickets should cost. After a setback in converting 1909 Krone to 1909 French Franc and 1909 French Franc to 2014 Euro, I decided instead to simply base ticket prices on the cost of a newspaper in 1913 Krone.

I had to rethink the way time passesThe story calls for 40-day fasting performances, and that number totally has like symbolism and stuff, so I can’t change that. I was originally thinking each performance would be like a stage in a game – you play it quick, go to the main map, and save, but I was also thinking that the game would move slow enough that you could interact with the audience and do other things that take time. The first number I wrote down when thinking how long a day should last was “5 minutes”. That would make each fast performance last over 3 hours. Even 1 minute a day felt rushed to me. Anyway, I’m making some changes. Most importantly, 1. You can save every day, not every fast performance, and 2. You don’t have to play night hours even though there are night hours in the story.

Oh, and I made some mediocre music last night using abundant-music. I did this thing where I kept everything the same except for the scale seed, which allowed me to make several songs with the same structure and melody shaping but different moods. If I don’t have time to do music properly, I’ll throw something from that set in. If I do have time, I’ll do it again but spend more time getting the song to sound good first. And if I don’t make the Compo and do the Jam, I’ll say “fuck it” and pick some music from the public domain production music you’ll probably recognize from Ren & Stimpy.

To do list – highest priority:

  1. Stats and stat display for The Hunger Artist and The Impresario
  2. Action controls for The Hunger Artist
  3. Day controls
  4. Improve Audience Behavior algorithms
  5. Tighten up Feedback loop between Audience mood and Hunger Artist mood
  6. Background Art
  7. Character Art

I leave you now with a drawing by Franz Kafka himself that might resonate with all of you who are working your asses off to make a game this weekend. It’s hard work, but don’t despair. You can do it.

*If you don’t know Ikuhara, imagine David Lynch making shows for Japanese 12-year-old girls.

I’m in late

Today was a busy day, but I finally have time to start with LD!  I’ll probably participate in the jam to get that extra day.  My tools:

Happy LDing everyone!

Hmm, now let me think about the theme…

They Lurk Beneath

Hello chaps and chapettes!  We are…

negadrive-small

Hot on the heels of our mega smash hit quadruple-A game of the millenium success last August, Dekasektor, we are back again!  We are doing a watery version of Defender, with boats and sea monsters, called They Lurk Beneath.

There are two of us working on the project, Rich (graphics and sound and artsy fartsy stuff, also is me) and Matt (all the actually clever techy stuff).   We are using Unity for the game itself, Photoshop and Flash for the graphics, and presumably FL Studio/Audacity/BFXR for the sounds.

Here are some sprites:

spritemockup

Re-did the rendering engine + more animations done and extra sprites.

Well I ended up having to re-do the whole rendering framework for the game. Originally I was loading the images then analyzing the pixels and saving them to memory in 2 dimensional integer arrays. This was all fine and dandy but when you 2000×2000 pixel spritesheets of an animation, it lacks in the performance department.

I switched the whole engine over to using Java’s BufferedImage class for all the sprites. This not only improved my performance by 6000 FPS, but added better alpha support so that the transparency isn’t out of whack.

We’ve got the character model and 2 of the enemy models fully rigged and have some animation done on them. We’ve so far got a walking animation, jumping and landing for the player, and walking for one of the enemies, and flying with wings for another enemy.

Now we’re working on implementing some new gameplay features and designing weapons for the character to use.

We also created some backgrounds for the game during this time.

First post – Work in progress !

We are busy with realizing our ideas, so we have no time to show you ingame assets yet.
This time we are quite happy with the topic and discussed several ideas until we could finally start working early this day.

Here are some pictures of our work in progress:

 

LD29_TeamFlare_01 LD29_TeamFlare_03 LD29_TeamFlare_02

LD29_TeamFlare_04 LD29_TeamFlare_05

Bloodbath – good for the skin

 

 

Here’s what I’ve been putting together: a game about the circulatory system!

progressyay

Making good time so far. Hope I keep it up.

 

Anybody up for some 2 player button smash?

I am working on a simple concept of pushing the other player down by slamming/smashing yourself on to the surface. You gain more area as you keep on pushing the other player down.

There are going to be a number of fun power ups-

-Increase ball size (and hence smashing power)

-2X obstacles to the opponent

-Reset the area if a player is stuck (stackable power up)

-Button spam duel  (non-sense, but fun)

This is the first look with the mechanics intact. In the next leg, I’ll be working on the art assets, and adding visual and audio feedbacks.

Work In Progress

Pew Pew, Frost Lasers

Made a ton of progress today so far, most the main components are there now. Just a few more concepts to finish up and then I should be able to start making gameplay gifs.

Here’s some shiny:

Entering Now!

Hi all

This is first time I’m entering Ludum Dare.Ill do my game in Html5.

Lets see if I can make it on time, Ill try hard for that.

Good Luck everyone!

First post, we have a screenshot

This is the first post about my and @ammaralsharekh game jam entry. Hopefully by tomorrow we’ll have it up and running :D.

A screenshot showing what the final game will hopefully look like.

A screenshot showing what the final game will hopefully look like.

Getting “FUNNER”; still missing something!

WORD DIGGER!  play it: http://mcsdwvl.github.io/worddigger/build/build.html

Game is coming along, getting to be more funnerer, but it’s still missing some je ne sais quoi.  It feels like it’s not quite a game yet. Key changes that have moved the ball forward:

  1. Adding a timer put the pressure on and made it more “gamey”.
  2. Adding “bomb” pieces made it possible to get out of situations that previously just felt unfair:

gameagaintrimmed

Time for another break I think.  Dog was pretty happy about the last one

beans

Reloading…

Ammo

Ammo