Well, after 51 hours or so, I’ve completed Dash.

It has sounds, a splash with the Black Marble logo (If you haven’t downloaded an earlier version, that’s the name of my one-man game making effort), a title screen, scoring, and sounds.

Anyone who wants to play it can pick up a copy here.

Edit: pansapiens has provided me with a Windows build, which can be found here.

Post-mortem after the break.

Dash – Post-Mortem

What went well:

• Art style works well
• Sounds work fairly well with the graphics
• Level generator works reasonably well, and creates some interesting challenges
• Scoring works fairly well, rewarding player progress and giving bigger rewards for completing levels

What went badly:

• Some level segment types (Such as caves and tunnels) couldn’t be made to work without major world structure refactoring, and thus weren’t included
• Scoring system isn’t as sophisticated as I’d have liked
• Larger and more complex levels can cause some slowdown

This is the first complete game I’ve produced in a while! It feels really good to have made this game, and minimalism seems to be a natural way for me to operate.

The game came out pretty fun, and can get absorbing at times. Still, it is more of a time killer than anything, but that’s okay with me. There is a consistent aesthetic that carries through in the graphics, the sound, and the gameplay.

I kinda wish I was able to implement other types of terrain, though. I’d have needed to rip up the world structure and the collision detection to make it work, but it would have been a good idea, I think.

All in all, I think it came out well. It feels good to get something done for a change, too. 😀

I’ve released an updated version of Dash!

This version fixes most of the bugs from the last release, including some issues with scoring, some levels being unbeatable, and the glitch that causes the game to crash if you move left from the starting point.

I’ve also broken down the level into a spatial hash that greatly improves performance and allows for longer levels.

You can now perform a high jump, as well. This was originally a workaround for some bad level generator behavior that occasionally made the ending edge of a platform chain unreachable (An issue that has been mostly dealt with anyway), but is useful in other situations.

Also, there is a new terrain type: Pillar fields. Pillar fields are series’ of narrow, often tightly grouped columns of land. The narrow landing places and short gaps require a bit of caution to navigate.

There’s also a readme now!

I don’t have a Windows build just yet, but those with Python and Pygame can pick up the source here.

Mini LD 16 is fast approaching!

It will kick off this Friday, February 19th at 9pm EST (GMT – 5)

The theme of this competition is Constraints.

Major goal:

• To explore what game designs we are able to create given a certain set of arbitrary constraints

Minor goals:

• To have the games share a common control scheme
• To have the games share aspects of look and feel
• To have total designer freedom of genre and topic

I won’t be announcing the final constraints until this Friday at 9pm EST but I’d like to provide a teaser of some of the things you may encounter.

Possible constraints:

• Must work with a specific color palette
• Limited to specific control inputs/keys
• Music length limits (looping allowed)
• Numbers of sound effects
• Specific screen dimensions
• Sprite or game object size requirements
• Background graphics
• Text limits
• Levels / Waves / Rounds requirements

As I mentioned in my minor goals above–I have no intention of specifically limiting the topic or genre of the game you create. I want there to be at least that one axis of complete freedom for the designer as they work within the constraints.  I’m looking forward to this weekend–see you all soon!

EDIT: 9 pm Constraints posted

Tags: constraints, limits, MiniLD, teaser

I submitted an entry in LD14. Those of you reading my journal during the compo will understand that I didn’t expect to win, place, or show. The goal for me was just to finish something, anything. After 48 frantic hours I was astonished to discover that I made my goal; I’d written a real live game! I’d finally succeeded at game development, which is something I’d tried in vain many times before.

That was about nine months ago. Next challenge: commercial game development. I came up with an idea in January, and just under a month of furious coding later, I finished my very first iPhone game, Teragati. Other than alpha channels, 22KHz sounds, and accelerometer as the principal control, it’s straight out of the 1980s. Good, clean, crack-like addictive fun.

Apple approved it for sale today in the App Store. 99 cents. If that’s out of your price range, let me know and I’ll find a promo code for you.

Next challenge: is there a Ludum Dare competition for marketing? 1,000 sales from scratch in 48 hours?

I like the idea of constraints on implementation.

I’ve decided that regardless of our constraints, I’m going to do the following (Provided that the official constraints don’t push these further):

• 4kb or less, including assets
• Developed in 6 hours (Only work time, not counting breaks)
• Rendering surface <= 100×100
• Some kind of procedural element

Here’s hoping!

—MrDude

Start: February 19th, 2010 at 9PM EST (GMT-5)

End: February 21st, 2010 at 9pm EST (GMT-5)

Submit Here | View All Entries Here

Tags: constraints

Jeebus, HybridMind! I was only expecting ONE constraint! Hahaha…

Here’s what I’m doing. I’m applying my previous constraints, but:

• I’m using the input and color restraints without issue
• I’m not going to have sound, since my mic does not work
• Music isn’t an issue, I wasn’t going to have it anyway
• I’m going to compromise on. I’m going to render onto a much smaller surface, then scale up to that size.

Everything else will be in. Starting tomorrow, probably in the afternoon.

(And I’m not completely ignoring the sound constraint: I’m not using SFXR, either 😛 )

—MrDude

Here are some concept art for my mini LD 16
They use most of the colours but not all yet!
When I started I really wanted to do something with parallax and a train. I’m still working out the plan for what the game-play will be.

Pics after break

Daytime

Nighttime

Tags: MiniLD #16

Not sure if I will go ahead and make this yet … but here’s a mockup on one idea:

I’ll take the opportunity to give myself a crash course in Flixel to make this, methinks. Now for sleep.

Here it goes, my first LD of any kind. I don’t have any concept art but the game is a cross of Tetris and some game that I don’t know its name. I am 1 hour into the project and it is going well. It will be done fast, only polishing remains tomorrow.

The constrains are a nice idea and I will stick to them. I took myself some time to get an idea for that input scheme. I want to see my voice as SFX in game, that will be fun.

Well back to work. I hope I make it.

So I had the unfortunate happening of passing out an hour after the constraints were announced, and I didn’t wake up until about 30 minutes ago.  In any case, I think that was a good thing because as soon as I woke up, my mind was fresh with ideas given the constraints of this MiniLD (yay!).

My biggest hurdle so far was coming up with a fun game idea that could use the input constraints well.  I thought it’d be fun to use the number keys at the top of the keyboard and situate your hands with one finger on each key (as if you had your hands on home row, just shifted up two rows).  Then each finger pretty much is a single trigger or button, and so the challenge then became what can I do with 8 push buttons? And that’s when ideas started coming.

I should note here that I also wanted to avoid mapping four of the keys to the directional motions left/down/up/right (which I’m sure you vi/vim users out there would’ve loved ;)).  So with that in mind, I started discarding a lot of ideas and typical gameplay mechanics.  And then as I was staring at my VCR, it kind of hit me: it would be cool to make a game the used some sort of tape transport control scheme would be cool, you know, have a rewind, fast forward, play/pause, and a “record” button.

So from there, this idea formed: you’re a runner.  I don’t know what kind of runner, maybe the world’s fastest runner, who knows?  But you’re a runner who runs at a constant speed but can also affect the time and space of things around you.  Your main time controls are:

• Slow down – Everything around you moves at a reduced speed.
• Play/Pause – Actually stop everything around you from moving.
• Record snapshot – Remember the player’s current location and other physics state (velocity, direction, etc).
• Speed up – Everything around you moves at a faster speed.

Of course, manipulating the time-space continuum is a tiring feat!  So for that reason you have kind of a “time stamina” you have to manage, and if you don’t have enough energy, mashing your transport controls aren’t going to do a thing.

As for your other hand, it’ll be used to activate various “abilities” your player learns in the form of pickups/powerups.  I have four slots to play with, and I’m thinking of reserving one to always be jump.  I might continue running (no pun intended) with the track runner theme and have other pickups be like a pole from a pole vault (so you can make it over higher obstacles) or a shot put (use as a projectile weapon).

Enough rambling. I need breakfast.

So I’ll apparently be ripping off Patapon, a rythm game on PSP with cool vector-like graphics. Of course it’s gonna be nowhere near that fancy, and I actually never played Patapon. We’ll see.

I think I have enough graphics to start with, and I’ll try to get some coding done.

I’ve ponding the constraints, but haven’t had that “I know” moment yet. At this point the input constraints seem the most limiting to me.

I’ve decided on my concept. Pentominoes in < 4k.

I’ve got my seven 1×1 images done, and am going to start on my code in a little while.

I’m beginning to see the merits of tiny code. I’m liking the challenge of it.

I’m going to be working in hour-long periods with breaks in-between. I’m not sure if I’ll do it all today, or if I’ll even use the entire 6 hours or if I’ll use 7 or 8. Part of the fun.

I’ve got the colors from the image matched pretty well, I think, and, well, I’m ready to go.

Also: If anyone here knows how to get an RGB (As opposed to RGBA) image out of Inkscape, I’d appreciate some instruction on the matter. )

Here’s hoping…

—MrDude

This ought to give you some idea of the direction I’m taking with this competition. It’s going to be a 2D puzzle platform game (my specialty 😀 ), with minimalist graphics (partly due to the comeptition restrictions, but mostly because I only know how to do pixel art).

I’ve figured out the story, though I’m not going to give it away here for fear of spoiling it. I’m mildly irritated by the restriction on screen size, since my game is set on a 32×32 grid – hence the black border around the image to pad it out.

The engine is up and running; I only need the level design now. Obviously that is the part that will take the most time.

I’m writing my first mini LD game! It’s going to be a simple game where you guess what object is being drawn on the screen. It’s designed for two players (on the same computer), but a single-player mode will be available as well. The code for the game is almost finished:

I just need to draw a lot more awful images!

This should be good. First attempt at anything. But I might have some ideas? I’m not even sure yet but I made this, so that’s a start.

I’m thinking some kind of basic space shooter with 8 (might be a bit too many) slots for available lasers with upgrade capabilities or something. Sort of making this up as I go, so should be interesting to say the least.

With the limited controls, I figured, why not make a simple little “eat smaller things, avoid bigger things” game, so I’ve been working on that. The idea is that you can only move left/right, and up/down is controlled by where on the screen you are. Here’s a screenshot.

thedaian's miniLD16

Tags: MiniLD #16

Slowly an idea jelled for me.  It’s a sort of tactical battle game.  Here’s my concept drawing.  The only resource is time, as the better fighters take longer to generate.  The interesting part comes from the planning required because you have a build queue/factory of four guys, but can only place them in the order that they generate.  Naturally the strong guys take a lot longer to build.

I’m just not feeling this for some reason. The theme rocks, especially the limited palette and fixed window size — but I’ve completely lost interest in the thing I’m building.

The title reflects my soul-crushing lack of creativity this weekend...

The game is in as3, and is, if you like, quite playable.

Tags: screenshot

I don’t have a lot of time free this weekend, so I’m doing a split Saturday + Monday 48 hour block.

I’m thinking of prototyping a game I’ve wanted to develop for a while. The basic idea is that there are a number of attractive / repulsive balls in an environment. Each surface in the environment, as well as each ball, has a polarity (somewhat like gravity, or electrostatic charge). Like states repell, opposite states attract. A ball’s polarity can be flipped by pressing a corresponding key. We can’t move the balls directly, but by altering their polarity we can push or pull them using nearby objects.

Here’s my initial screen shot

Rythm patterns recognition works! It was a lot easier than I had expected. See in screenshot:

• Patterns are described as string, for instance “1121”, where numbers from 1 to 4 mean drums 1 to 4 (and also keys 1 to 4)
• The actual rythm is given by a list of numbers, given in beats. {0,1,2,3} means that the four notes of this pattern are played on  each beat. {0, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3} is a tad more funky
• If no notes are played in the two beats following the last note, it times out and the pattern is reseted.
• After each new note, we check if the current sequence matches a pattern, and then we check that the recorded times are close enough to the wanted times. If yes, the action is launched.

Note that this implies that no pattern can be the prefix of another one, and that no note in a pattern can be equal or longer than two beats.

Pom pom pom TADA pom!

I’ve don’t written any code yet. I’ve only made some artworks. My game will probably

be a simple plateformer in the halloween theme and  will look like this:

Concept art for mini-ld 16

This is like the fourth prototype I’ve worked on so far.  Things are going slowly today for me as I have been scattered between a few ideas while I hoped for one to spark my excitement.  I think I’ve finally got an idea I’m psyched about enough that I’m doing a bare bones playable version of.  Hoping the scope is right for the time remaining.  We shall see.

Tags: constraints, prototype, wip

No pictures, because nothing visually has changed, but I’ve got a playable demo of sorts now, so there’s that. I spent a few minutes with a microphone recording some (terrible quality) sounds and playing with windows sound recorder to get the effects, as they were, correct.

Current version of the game is here: http://thedaian.dreamhosters.com/miniLD16-midway.rar

Controls are: 1 and 2 move you left and right, respectively, and 3 will give you a burst of speed in the up/down directions. Escape will close the game. Eat the smaller squares by getting on top of them (the collision code is a bit off right now, so you mostly have to get on top of the upper left corner of another square to eat it). The screen is divided into sections, and each section will either let you move up or down. You can generally tell the direction based on the movements of other squares.

A few things that need to be added
-a proper win condition. (once you get big enough, there’s some graphics problems)
-particle effects or something to indicate where the barriers between up/down are
-a limit to your boost, recharging with time (that’s the plan for the red bar on the side)

Game is written in C++/SDL, and is feasibly playable on everything, but was compiled on a Windows XP machine.

Tags: #miniLD16

For my first Ludum Dare activities, I come to `Contstraints’.  I decided to make the control scheme restriction mirror something in the real world where it makes sense to control with numbers.  Such as flame throwers.  What’s a better use of a flame thrower than carrying you aloft in a wicker basket?  Nothing, that’s what.  So now we have Pyloon, the Python Ballooning Sim.  Most of the code is working, and the art is about how good I can make it (this was actually the hardest constraint — using seven discrete colors!), so I will now focus on trying to put together music and sound.  This will be hard as I do not have a mic.

Current look below More:

So now I have little guys. They execute the orders given with the different rythms. As of now, they can march forward, retreat, cover with shields, and attack. Arrows fly, spike guys charge. Of course there’s nothing to attack, but that is just detail.

Screenshots don’t really give a good idea, without the movement or the sound. But my video capture was awful, so no joy.

And sleep, for now.

Well, after quite some time in front of my computer I finally came to a playable demo where you can drive your tank through a 9-color landscape and fire you bullets as much as you want 😀 . Actually I used an indexed-colormap in gimp to convert a baked colormap in order to fit the color-constraint.

Control:

1-Left 3-right 8-forward 9-backward 0-fire

You can start the game from the website with java-webstart. Follow this link:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/sheriff/sheriff.html

You will need java to start the game. (Just try what happens if you press the button! If it does not work, plz tell me your configuration…)

…but if they did, they wouldn’t break (like yours is about to)

play is here!

Tags: dinosaurs

Hey, wow, I finished my game for this Ludum Dare contest.

I have to say this is probably the best game I’ve made yet in a contest. It is actually pretty fun.

The name of the game is Doomsday Eve. It is a cross between Missile Command and these Chaining games that are common on the Internet. 

I will post a full post-mortem later, but I believe this game meets all of the constraints of this contest. 

It only uses the 9 colors. It is the correct resolution. The sounds I made using the vocoder on my MicroKorg (which basically means a Microphone with processing). The music is slightly less than 24 seconds.

Actually the input category I really didn’t meet I just realized. I don’t use any keys on the keyboard actually. Just the mouse and the mouse button. Oh well, this game would not have worked well on the keyboard at all.

Anyway, there is a java applet (JRE 1.6) you can play here:

 www.DoomsdayEve.com

 Thanks and let me know if you enjoy it!

But to fully enjoy the game (and it is worth it because it’s pretty fun), I suggest you just download the jar and run it fullscreen on your computer. Again you have to have JRE 1.6 installed on your windows/max/linux computer. 

Just double-click the jar and the game should start in fullscreen mode:

 Fullscreen Download Edition

 This was also by far the easiest time I’ve had of it. I only spent about 6 hours or so making the game. I wish every contest went like this one!

Here’s an experimental piece for the Mini Ludum #16. Right now there is no actual goal, but I’m liking how bizarre its becoming. I’m only using the 9 colors available, and I’m doing a really easy overlay to make it look cool.

http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/LD16/CoastalBlues.2346.swf

Controls:
1 2 3 4 – Change Sin Wave Speed
7 8 9 0 – Move X value of Sin Wave

I wanted to finally post a link to a playable prototype of my flash game in progress.

Make sure to click on the flash game window to give it focus or the keys won’t work!

It uses all 8 control keys (1,2,3,4 & 7,8,9,0) and they are currently mapped to 8 random UFO actions right now.  WHY?  Because you are playing a slacker alien that wasn’t paying attention in your UFO Academy and now it is time for your 3 minute final exam to see if you graduate.  You slacked so much you have no clue how the crazy thing operates.  You’ll have access of four directions of movement, an energy shield, a death beam, and two different particle attacks.  You must try your best to figure out how to annihilate as many humans, cars, tanks, jets, and helicopters as you can to see if you pass.

Currently using boxes for object art, no collision detections or scoring yet, and I’ve only implemented humans, cars, and helicopters behaviors.  I’m quite happy with how they are moving around though.

Tags: aliens, constraints, MiniLD, progress, ufo

Here’s a screenshot of how the game will work in general. Two players, (I could do playing against a CPU for 1 player but being a huge NOOBhole limits my time immensely) they shoot at each other. Each has an amount of health and a powerup level. Both will be shown over each player’s side (when I get around to it). Only the player whose lasers match the color of the powerup can pick it up, and the other can shoot it to kill it before the owner can grab it. I haven’t figured out just how the powerup level matters yet, whether it’ll increase your main laser somehow per level or just add to unlocking a massive one-time use attack against the other player, like a HUGE laser or a wide spread or something. Anyway, check it out, suggestions are very welcome.

While this isn’t quite finished (no music, no scoring, no title/menu, no levels, needs more game logic & eye candy), I’m impressed with the progress I made with Flixel. This is also the first time I’ve really taken the ‘graphics first’ approach, and I’m happy with the way it panned out. The mockup screenshot I made about 24 hours ago looks (almost) exactly like the game.

You can play it in it’s current incomplete state here (requires Flash).

Tags: Flixel

Here’s a screenshot of my progress so far:

Also done some music bits. Most of the time has been spent working on things behind the scenes; mostly graphics processing stuff and sound mixing.

Had to disable fullscreen mode since SDL does something weird with the audio callback there (I need that to work for audio/visual synchronization, which I definitely want to do), but otherwise it actually works now. There’s even a simple level generator (wip), so for once I’m actually going to have some levels =)

If it gets done, that is. I kinda doubt this is going to be done before the deadline. Still have to add player and enemy characters, and interaction, and lots of other stuff, and I don’t know if I can do much more today. Still want to see how the game turns out though, so I’ll probably finish it sometime regardless.

Mr. Blocky. Control the evil blocks and reach the top.

Link to LD entry (with download)

Thanks for playing, feedback is wanted

Here is the latest flash build of my game (you have to click on the game before it will have key focus)

Starting to get collisions and scoring in.  Still need to implement time over conditions and enemy ramp up at various time points.  Need to get jets and tanks in now too.  You can get points now and be killed though.  Tons of balancing will have to be done once I get all the game elements in.  Oh and also hopefully add music, sounds, and more then rectangles for all the objects too! 9 hours left…

Tags: aliens, constraints, graduation, MiniLD, prototype, ufo, wip

My first mini ludum dare game is done! It’s a simple game where you guess the object being drawn on the screen. A single-player mode is available, but the game is most fun with another person. So download the game and then grab a friend, partner, neighbour, cat or priest!

Download What the Duck?! (48kb)

What the Duck?! menu screen

Drawing is not one of my talents...

I made this:

Rolo Bloco

It’s an epic depiction of a war between two tribes of alien creatures who live in the world that doesn’t resemble our own even a bit.

One is the tribe of Rolo, benevolent round creatures that tend to bounce from everything they see in a frolicking manner.

The others, Bloco are cold-blooded hard blocky entities, that seem to be addicted to crush evertything.

Lurk into the deep, vast world of Bloco Roco, use your imagination, meet the tribes, fight and cry with them. Do not miss this ultimately epic gaming experience.

Make critical decisions, be the first to act, show no hestitation nor fear. Choose your tribe and win them a bright and colourful future!
Enjoy the real-time battling with friends and family now!
(And the price is fine too)

Send troops of your favourite side using keys
1234 - for Bloco
7890 – for Rolo

Share the fun!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 6:11 pm and is filed under MiniLD #16. 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.

At this point, all I’m doing is refining graphics. It is essentially done.

It’s available
Here.

Hit the jump for video.

The Dragon is a 75% puzzle, 25% platform game with 30 levels. It saves your progress and allows you to play levels again if you have already beaten them.

The story is told through white text that appears on the level, and which follows your progress through the game. The story is intentionally ambiguous, and supports several interpretations. Spoilers may or may not be found in the comments below this text.

Click screenshot for download.

I will be writing a post-mortem shortly, once the competition is over.

Made with Game Maker.

Alright, this was 100% an experiment to see what I could do with Flixel and Flash, and how much I could push out of the little web player. I’m doing a crazy amount of copies and color checks, I even had to extend Flixel a little bit to allow the sprites to be more color based (fill was not setting _color). The intro screen is Conway’s game of life wrapping around the edges, cause I love that one.

Game Link:

Sine Bender – http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/MiniLD16/

Source! (with Flixel license) –
http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/MiniLD16/SineBender.2-21.zip

Controls:

1 2 3 4 – Control the speed of the sine waves from top to bottom
7 8 9 0 – Control the x-value of the sine waves from top to bottom

Objective:

Every time a sine wave you control intersects an incoming sine wave, a gold ball appears. When this ball hits the left side of the screen, a white ball appears. Fill in the entire left side of the screen with white balls to Win! You have 30 seconds.

Only got started a few hours ago but couldn’t pass up the great theme.

I’m not starting entirely from scratch, as I’m using some code from my Hexplanet Demo , but it’s been public available for a while so that’s within the rules. However, I’m going to have to bend the contraints a little bit — I’m allowing myself to use blends of the colors a bit, and since I’m doing this for the iphone I can’t exactly hit the resolution or input contraints. Still I’ll try my best to stay within the spirit of the constraints given.

There’s no way I’m going to finish this today but at least I cam make a start of it…

Well, this probably took about 20 hours, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.  But my game is done.  It’s actually pretty hard, due to the AI that tries to follow you, or escape.  I actually turned down the difficulty a bit.  Anyway, ripping straight from the readme:

—IMPORTANT PART—

Controls: 1 and 2 will move you left and right, respectively, 3 will give you a speed boost (the bar on the right will decrease while boosting).  Your vertical movement is limited by your position on the screen.  The white specks give you an indication of what direction you’ll go in that general area.  Escape or 0 will quit the game.

Gameplay: You are the orange dot.  You must eat smaller dots to grow bigger.  When you reach a certain size, the game ends and you can play again.  Enemy positions are random (except for the first game, which has a constant seed).  Enemies are color coded by size, with small sized enemies being light blue, and large enemies being a darker blue.  Enemy movements are semi-random, but they will chase you or avoid you (depending on size) if you get too close.

Download the game here: http://barchok.com/p/miniLD16/miniLD16-thedaian.zip

Get the source code (only) here: http://barchok.com/p/miniLD16/miniLD16-source.rar

Game compiled/tested on Windows XP.  Could feasibly work on other operating systems.

Soo,…after lot’s of work and lot’s of problems at places I wouldn’t have expected before I finally have something to release. See it as demo as I again hadn’t enough time to really design a level. But now I have to stop cause I have somehow think about work tomorrow…. 😀

The Level is still the same as yesterday now with NPC…Very very “intelligent” ones with from time to time strange behaviour 😀 Actually I worked lot at my engine but in the end didn’t use most of the new stuff… (clever, isn’t it? 😀 ).

Here a satellite-picture from the whole scene:

Play the game here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/tank/tank.html

It tried to fulfill all constraints. (color,24sec loop,microphone effects,size and input)

The time has come for my first LD compo.  Life and time constraints made things more difficult, but I did get a few hours to create art/code before the end of the compo (technically, it’s not over, but I don’t know what to refine within an hour).  Sound turned out to be harder than I thought, and was scrapped (I didn’t use SFXR, and my music loop is 0 seconds, so I meet the constraints).  In this compo, I learned how to create a scrolling, collidable image, as well as how to use pygame.mask collision detection.

Pyloon is a very casual, slow-going game.  It does eventually become impossible to continue, though; this is the area that could use the most tuning.

A .zip file containing a windows executable and needed data files can be found here, as well as a python ‘egg’ and the source code.

Screenshot beneath More:

You can play this game in your browser (warning: sounds will play)

Concept:
It’s time for your final exam to graduate from your UFO school. Only problem is you were a complete slacker. You have no idea how to fly your ship. You have 3 minutes to impress your commander by destroying as many humans, cars, helicopters, tanks and jets as you can–or suffer the consequences!

All you can remember is to use the keys 1,2,3,4 and 7,8,9,0

Tools used:
* Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using my mouth and microphone and Audacity to process the sound effects. I composed the music loop in Reason.

Tags: academy, alien, city, destruction, final, flight, graduation, humans, jets, MiniLD, tanks, ufo

My entry for Mini-LD 16: Constraints.  I’d appreciate any comments you might have, as well as what scores you end up getting.

Click on the image above to play.

It’s pretty basic and I didn’t get to half the stuff I wanted to, but here’s the two player versus space shooter, PEWPEW.

Controls:

Player 1 –
1: move down
2: move up
3: shoot

Player 2 –
0: move down
9: move up
8: shoot

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/139336/PewPew.zip

Windows exe. Unzip, open game.exe, shoot friends.

Well, finished my mini-miniLD game, which i made in about 3 hours… it’s so rushed, it doesn’t even have a name! i spent way to much time on initial graphics, and in the end didn’t have enough for stuff like menu graphics, which ended up being quite simplistic, I like how it came out though, especially the character’s walk cycle. And…. i just realized you can’t win the game… well i guess that’s something i need to fix… anyways, screenshot!

Yay for Jpegs!

oh, and a link to the other page thingy for this:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=1548

so yeah! fun weekend

It’s done!
It’s a bit further then my last attempt, I hope it’s interesting!

Controls, use the numbers to select a car, press the same number a second time, after a brief delay, to drop the object. Try to fill all the cars!

http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LDMini16.swf

Late

I gave up on my original idea and didn’t think I was going to do a mini-ld game this time, but then suddenly within a couple hours of the deadline I decided to whip together something bad but playable.

PLAY ONLINE

On a happier note, I did make four games this weekend!  The other three were for Klik of the Month Klub.  over here.

Edit:  Timelapse!

Tags: final

I spent all day thinking of a name and Horse Racing is my best idea.

I’m a little late, but had a late start, and I’ve been constantly distracted by the Olympics this weekend. That’s where the idea came from, watching speed skating.

It’s kind of silly. Just bet on which horse you think will win. 1,2,3,4.

I wish could have used more of those lovely blues. The sound and music is the best part in my semi-sane sleep deprived opinion.

link to download page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=505

Thanks for playing. It’s been great fun making this

So the lil guys now have opponents to fight. Note that arrows and spikes don’t do damage yet, but that will come…

I’m not dead! Just very late, but it’s a mini so I guess it’s not that bad.

EDIT: also, i’m very high on caffeine. oO’

I’m having a big gameplay direction crisis. I’m wondering if I’m not making the game too complex, and on the other hand I think making it simpler would make it a lot less interesting.

Plus the “musical ear” aspect. Should I expect players to be able to reproduce reasonably complex rythms, and how many different ones? This is hard

Plus I suck at art. Boo hoo.

Note the split screen...

Well, I doubt I’ll have anything like a game done within the allotted 48 hours, but here’s a playable test:

http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/miniLD16

And here’s a screen shot:

I thought I’d finish tonight, but sleeping 4 hours last night really doesn’t help. I’m off to bed, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow… For once I’m gonna try to really polish this game. I think it might turn out good.

So I think the gameplay is done. The game is fully playable in versus mode (two players on one keyboard). I have texts and scripts ready for the tutorials (which will probably prove very necessary for a rhythm game), but I still need to plug them in. And I have the intention of thinking about making an AI. Or let’s modestly say a computer opponent, because I’m frankly doubting my abilities to make anything clever enough to make the game interesting against it.

I'm not sure about this title, by the way...

In a post-LD version (as if the deadline wasn’t two days ago already…), I’d like to think about networking. I know it’s not always easy to find someone to play around the same computer. On the other hand it’s a lot more fun…

Anyhoo. I really need to sleep.

It’s neither well coded nor robust, but circle versus circle and circle versus line collision response are now working well enough to continue prototyping. I’m going to put a bit more time into getting the physics working, then I should be ready to begin testing a few puzzle ideas.

This miniLD was like more or less all of the last competitions before. I work and work on writing frameworks for the specific game leaving not enough time to do something cool gameplay with it. So I decided to invest an additional weekend so that I finally can say:”Yes it is some kind of game!” 😀 So stay tuned and buy some fuel for the upcoming Tank-Missions 😀

Ah, as the competition is over, I decided to add one green color to the colormap and I will really think about kicking the input-constraint or just adding additional gamepad-support. Maybe I will use a MiniLD and a Normal-Mode. Similar to the old “Turbo”-Button of my very first PC (8086) where you could lower the speed from 10MhZ to 4.8MhZ . Unbelivable 10 (TEN) MhZ…. seems to be some years ago 😀

Here a very first possible new tank…(blender render)

So yay, I finally got the tutorials to work properly. As promised (and I don’t feel late at all…) the game is released!

No AI, so the solo mode is deactivated. The rest should be fine.

Get it on the submission page (Windows and GNU/Linux).

I hope the Windows version works. I crosscompiled from Linux, and although it ran in Wine, it was super slow.

I don’t have new screenshots, except tutorial text, so I’ll put back old ones. Because, heh, a “final” log entry should have screenies…

Here’s the readme:

Rise of the Taka-Pum

A Mini LD #16 entry by Noé Falzon (Tenoch)
<firstname.lastname@aliceadsl.fr>

Lead your army of Taka-Pum to victory using the Heavenly Drums of Awesome!

How to run

Windows: double-click Taka-Pum.bat
GNU/Linux: run Taka-Pum.sh (depending on your file manager, double clicking on it might be enough). You will need the following libraries: Lua 5.1, SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_gfx, SDL_ttf.

Controls

1,2,3,4 = player 1’s drums
7,8,9,0 = player 2’s drums

Game includes tutorials.

Note: Solo mode doesn’t work yet. You’ll have to find friend.

License

The source code is under GNU GPL v3.
Sounds and graphics are cc-by-nc-sa.

GNU/Linux notes
The game comes with a precompiled binary (evolcore.so) created on a Ubuntu system. If it doesn’t work on your particular distribution, compile evolcore.c into a shared library evolcore.so, linked against the libraries mentioned earlier.

So here’s a screenshot of my miniLD-16 inspired project. This is mostly just my hexplanet demo with a new tileset drawn from the miniLD palette. I don’t really like the stripey pattern (unexplored land), I need to do something about that.

Hex Moon

Most of the work here isn’t visible in the screenshot — I ported the hex demo to OpenGL ES, using proper VBO’s and shaders instead of the immediate mode crap it was doing before. This screenshot isn’t running on the iPhone, but it could be. This is running on linux using the PVR SDK in OGLES emulation mode. I’m finding it to be a quite nice SDK, btw, if you’re doing any iPhone graphics stuff and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

This will probably be my last screenshot of this as a mini-LD entry, and I might not get a chance to work on it much in the next few months as I’m trying to ship a completely different iPhone project but I do hope to get back to this one, I think it will be a lot of fun and worth finishing.

I started late, last night at 7pm, and I’m going to work until 7pm Saturday.  So now I’ve had just over 15 hours of possible work time. Of course, I’ve used very little of that–how much I’m not sure.

I have done something at least. My goals will have to be a little scaled back, but I do have a working framework for the majority of the action part of gameplay.

Before I go into what I want this game to be, here’s a link to the current version and a screenshot.

The screenshot doesn’t do a great job of describing it. The goal (for now) is to go as fast as you can. You can do this by combining two “fuel” boxes and one “oxygen” box (yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be). If your bar is full of oxygen, you get a big speed boost and it’s all randomized. Any order can be used in the fuel-oxygen combination, but if you combine anything other than 2 fuel and one oxygen, your speed decreases. Your ship also decelerates over time. And for now you can ignore the “you’re going to fast” message, because I haven’t implemented damage yet. There will be enemies and weapon combinations eventually, as I put in damage.

Eventually I’m going to make the game live up to the “trade” in the name by making this sort of arcade side-scroller take place between planets, between which you carry cargo.

And as for the rules, I’m sort of breaking the palette one. As you can see in the screenshot, when moving fast the background gets blurred. I just put this in to make tearing less noticeable, but maybe I’ll remove it later with different backgrounds for different general speed categories.

Oh, and don’t bother trying to win, all that happens is that “You won! Congratulations!” appears in the text box in the lower left and the distance remaining goes negative.

Hope the game will turn out to enjoyable.

Here’s my game. Late on my goal of about two hours ago, but a lot of that time was spent finalizing stuff (embedding fonts, testing on other computers, uploading the right version…) and it’s ready now, I think, to share.

Here’s a link to the webpage to play it.

The goal of the game is to speedily progress through a stage, without dying on the way. Additionally, after each stage you can buy commodities to make money when you finish the next stage. (You are a freelance trader.)

Controls and combinations:

Basically, to finish a stage you have to use combinations of ingredients accelerate your ship and destroy enemies so they don’t destroy you.

That said, note that the boxes that hold your ingredients are arranged so that they can be easily used with the number keys (1-4, 7-0). You have to combine three ingredients to perform an action in Combo Trader, and the order doesn’t matter. When you combine three ingredients, it does something depending on the combination it matches, and the boxes that you took the ingredients from are refilled with random ones.

Here are all the combinations so far:

• Two fuel, one oxygen: Gives your ship a speed boost.
• One fuel, one oxygen, one bullet: Fire four lasers at enemy ships.
• Two bullets, one oxygen: Destroy a bunch of ships, as long as they’re behind you. (Reasoning to this: you are firing bullets without the power of the fuel, so you can only hit things behind you. Not physically accurate, but it works well enough for the game.) This combination is overpowered.
• Any three of a single type: Has no effect on your ship. This is useful if you have too many of a certain ingredient.
• Any combination not listed: Slows down your ship. The ingredients are still thrown away (so you can get better ones) but your ship is slowed about the same amount that three boosts (fuel+fuel+oxygen) would accelerate it.

On to the interface.

• In the lower-right corner, there’s a speedometer, which displays your current speed, with arbitrary units. Your ship goes at speed “5″ if you don’t boost, and will gradually return to this speed over time, so you need to keep boosting to stay fast.
• The big bar along the bottom is a progress bar. Once it is filled, you progress to the next stage. (More on stages later.)
• On the top is the bar of ingredients. The three boxes in a row below it are the combo bar, which will hold the ingredients as you press their corresponding keys. When this fills up with three ingredients, the ingredients are combined and the bar empties.
• In between these two bars are two solid bars: the top shielding and the bottom armor. If armor runs out, you’re dead, but your shield slowly recharges. It is best to destroy enemies using the combat combinations before they can damage your armor, as your armor only regenerates after a full stage.

The stage system I put in for now is a bit weird. When you complete a stage, there’s a Trade screen, where you see how much you earned from selling boxes and buy them for the next round.
How the system works:

• You start out with no packages, and do a dry run. When you press ’1′ on the main menu and see the interface described earlier, you are in the dry run.
• After completing your first stage, you see the trade screen. Press the number keys to indicate which slots you want to use to carry boxes to the next trade screen. Slots that are carrying boxes are covered with red symbols that look like an X and a + combined. In the next stage, you can still use the ingredient you see under the symbol, but in doing so you drop the cargo, and cannot sell it to make money at the next trade screen. (1 unit of money buys a box, and they sell for 5.)
• After ten seconds (indicated by the countdown in the upper-right), the next stage begins. After completing this stage, you see another trade screen. The stage, trade screen, stage, trade screen sequence repeats until you’re bored or flash player succumbs to a memory leak I didn’t plug.

So there it is, my game of quick reflexes, tactical thought, and lame pixel-art graphics! Maybe I’ll clean up the source code and continue it later.

Comment with any question and I’ll clarify, this post was kind of rushed and I might have missed some things.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 9:50 pm and is filed under MiniLD #16. 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.

Well,…actually I tried to build a nice game with the codebase I created on miniLD. Well,…haha! I started with a tank-training scenario and in that I “just” wanted to build a method that let then tank-“tube” lookAt a certain point. My engine somehow cannot handle this if the tube is child of a node that already has a rotation,…Well,..I failed in this. So I really was killed by math. I tried and thought and thought and tried…a bit too confuse I have to admit…so my weekend-project stuck right at the beginning. But if you want to start the tank-training you can give it a try here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/tank/tank.html

At the moment the game violates the color-constraint…I will change this at the end. Here a screenshot:

Have a nice week,…

I’ve decided to make my views on the subject of games as art known.

The text referred to in the title appears after the rant. It is a self-descriptive piece, and very ranty, but I personally think that it’s a perspective that needs to be addressed.

It’s no secret, I don’t think, that I’m not sophisticated. I’m not high-brow, I’m not much for fine art, and I don’t like conceptual… Well, anything.

I don’t drink fine wine, nor do I want to. I don’t go to art museums, and never will if I have my say. I enjoy the works of the former Blue Collar Comedy troupe. (Who talk about such heady subjects as the anaesthetics given during colonoscopies and mole-covered relatives)

I played Passage, but found it incredibly dull, and didn’t enjoy Gravitation much more. (Okay, I admit, Silent Conversations was pretty fun) I like Metal Slug, Urban Terror, and Custom Robo.

I am here to declare my place in the indie game developer community. I am here to defend storyless shooters, here to preserve stupid fun, and to be a champion of  chopping up generic monsters in a generic dungeon as a classic to be revered. I am here to speak against haughty elitism, stories that pretend to be games but aren’t, and a-priori work simply for the sake of appearing clever.

I’m a redneck, and I’m proud.

Thank you.

—MrDude

I’ve received a few requests now, so here’s the announcement nice and early.

Ludum Dare 17 is scheduled for April 23rd-25th weekend. Themes can be suggested on the wiki. Specifics will be announced as the date gets closer.

Sorry I’m late.  Couldn’t make it last weekend, and this weekend was spent between making this and getting caught up in the Canada/USA men’s hockey game.

This is my game

Controls are 1234 7890, and it’s a 2 player game.  Things collide with each other when they are of different color and are not blending into the background.  Instructions are in the ReadMe.  This game started off as a game about strategy and ended up more a game about everything being completely unmanageable.  Or maybe it’s just me.  I’m terrible at this game is what I’m trying to say.

This is my first Ludumdare entry, so any constructive criticism is welcome!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=1752

Also I maintained an off-site journal about the making of, because I didn’t think of just putting it up on here.  You can read it here:

http://www.faqr.org/ryan/tbc/?cat=49

So I had this great MiniLD idea, but it turned out that HybridMind completely ripped it off, without even knowing it!
Also, since he did it a month before me, it’s not really a ripoff, just bad luck for me. Stupid MiniLD booking a year in advance…

So here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m going to tell you what I had in mind, and if enough/any people are interested (despite the close resemblance with the previous month’s Mini), we’ll go with it anyway.
If not, I’ll find a new idea shortly. Maybe you could even chose between the two themes.

So, here it goes:

Constraints

Dear, dearer and dearest LDers,

in anticipation of this coming event, and giving in to my never-ending love for the golden times when awesome games held into 1 MB cartridges, I prepared for you a tiny game engine, humorously named:

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua and C API, offering the following characteristics:

– Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
– Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
– Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
– Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

It presents as binaries (for GNU/Linux and Windows, MacOS X if a good will makes the port) to which you feed a Lua source file in which you define callbacks such as update(), keypressed(), etc, and use an API that allows you to:

– Load images/palettes
– Blit images to screen
– Write pixels to screen
– Modify palette on the fly
– Load sound files
– Play sound files
– that kind of stuff

For those who do not desire to learn/use Lua, I intend to make a similar C API, so that it could be used from any C-friendly language (but then it requires you to compile the game yourself, thus limiting portability).

In fact, if you don’t like the engine at all, you can even make anything you want, provided that you stick to the constraints and use no library other than simple IO (basically SDL + standard C/Lua). The idea was just to give the same basecode to a bunch of wizard gamedevers and see what happens.

So there it was. Feel free to express yourself in the comments of this post so that we can decide together what is the better option. Also, the engine is almost entirely coded but it still needs a big evening to finish things up,so if no one is interested, I’ll probably play the lazy card, and just announce a one word theme.

Let me know, LDers!

Yay. I finally polished the graphics of my LD 16 entry “Where is the cheese” and submitted it to the iPhone App Store.
Get it if you like it.

Tags: final, iphone

Hi,

I just set up a community website.

ghbrvlowabrvfladberogvlwrvfwlo games

It’s aim is to enable game developers to sell their games in a neat and hopefully profitfull manner.

Unlike e-commerce websites, it works in a different manner. It values quantity over quality, by accepting all the games you post there. The games are accepted until 700MB limit is reached. when that happens, I will assemble a CD ISO containing the games, a neat autorun menu for them, and a booklet for printing. Then I will distribute it online (probably through torrent protocol), so everyone can burn it and sell it themselves.

I think you guys made many games, that you think are of too low quality to sell, and this is the opporturnity.

I’m really looking forward to see some LD games there. also, tellme what do you think of this idea.

PS. It’s the catchiest domain name ever

a towlr game made in unity, made in 2 hours yesterday. trying to get faster at making games.  first towlr with bloom?

unity web player

mac os x universal

windows

Tags: towlr

Since several persons on the compo blog and the IRC channel seemed interested in my original idea, despite the closeness with the previous Mini, I am hereby releasing the aforementionned Retro engine!

Weee!

Source code, Linux binaries, Windows binaries

As you can see, it lacks terribly of Windows binaries. I’m terribly sorry, but couldn’t get my cross compilation thingy to work. It usually goes flowlessly, but here I’ve been battling for an hour, and I gave up.

EDIT: Thanks to Sos, we now have Windows binaries. Yepee! Thanks a lot to Sos. All hail Sos!

If someone with a good heart would like to, it can be built as follows: compile io.c retro_lua.c and lua_api.c into retro.exe. That’s all. But you’ll need dev libs for SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and Lua 5.1

First one to publish a windows binary will win my eternal gratitude, and a cake*

Both source and Linux distribution contain full documentation (I hope), and an example game to help you get started.

And, as promised also, there is (a bit more) than a week before the actual Mini LD, which will therefore be held on the week end of the 20-21 of March 2010. No worries though, we’ll have the usual “take 48h when you want” policy, or even more if you like.

Okee. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Of course, don’t hesitate to ask questions on IRC and in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m gonna catch some z’s (I just love this expression, sorry).

Yours truly,

Tenoch

* The cake is a lie.

Thanks everyone for coming out and making the meet-up such a huge success. We had more than 20 people show up, 19 of which stuck around for a gathering where we brought disorder to the Moscone food court. Hit the jump for pictures and video.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:15 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.

Mike “Hamumu” Hommel‘s recent Ludum Dare game “Robot Wants Kitty” is rocking the charts at Kongregate. This post-compo version features music by DrPetter, and numerous enhancements to the original game.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hamumu/robot-wants-kitty

As of right now he’s #2 on the monthly top games, with well over 350,000 plays! Wow!

Show your support! Go to Kongregate, play it, and give him 5 stars because you love Kitty. You do love Kitty, right?

Since I finally managed to wake up, I guess it’s time to officially launch the compo.

Theme: Constraints (déjà vu?..)

To participate in the competition, you must use the provided “Retro” framework (links at the bottom of the post):

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua API, offering the following characteristics:

– Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
– Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
– Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
– Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

If you don’t like Lua, there is a C API as well, but you’ll need to compile your game yourself, while the Lua based games should be (hopefuly) portable. If you like neither of them, you can also program your game in any language/platform, provided that you stick to the given constraints (and use no external library other than what is provided by standard Lua/C)

Note: the Retro thingy doesn’t actually check if your game weighs more than a MB or not. Furthermore, there seem to be problems with “light” music formats like XM, so if the size limit is exceeded because of music, it’s ok.

Note 2: remember to read the documentation! It containts important and valuable information. The packages also contain an example game.

Optional themes: Cute but Evil or Legendary Cosmic Monsters

If you have no inspiration whatsoever, you can use this secondary theme list to get you started.

Schedule

It’s a Mini, so don’t worry too much about time limits. Take 48 hours when you can/want or even a bit more if you feel like polishing your game.

Downloads

Thanks to the community, we have several Retro binaries to use. They should be compatible.

Source, GNU/Linux (32bits), Windows (MinGW),  Windows (MSVC + more options), Windows (LuaJIT version), Mac OS X

See previous post + comments for more details

Final words

Oh well, have fun

Good luck!

I don’t know why, but I seem to do better when there are constraints when making a game. Somehow I think the pixels and the limited palette inspire me to try harder for some reason. Been focusing on the artwork and sounds for my game all day. Not a big fan of Lua, but it makes it really easy to test the art and animations in game.

The game I’ve come up with is based on the question, “Who would win a battle between a wizard and a warrior?” Thus, the name of it is Wizard Vs. Warrior. I’ve decided to make it a kind of adventure. You are a warrior that has to kill the “evil” wizard. I think I got the idea (or at least the inspiration) from Conan the Destroyer actually. Simple concept, but I’m having a ton of fun with it. I’ve got a lot of the graphics done and soon I’ll start putting it all together. This game has been so fun to make so far. Hope I’m able to finish it.

This one has lots of cool pixel art. Here are some screenshots:

Had something I wanted to try at this sort of low resolution, and after reading through a paper and a fair bit of fiddling I’ve got the basics working. Not exactly an original idea, but I thought a nice improvement would be to actually try and make it fun. Am I being vague enough here? A screenshot might help a few people catch onto what I’m talking about:

Anyway, will try to add more tomorrow, as it’s far too late already.

Ok, so I only had about two hours to attempt this, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

It looks cool, but unfortunately all you can do is fall, there’s no collision or anything, and the scrolling is messed up.

However, I didn’t read the docs ahead of time and didn’t realize just how constrained the constraints were. My initial plan was to just use a large image with the whole map predrawn, and use getpixel for collision. But retro engine wouldn’t load large images, or allow getpixel, or blit a partial image. So I had to draw all the tiles. I don’t blame the engine — I just should have taken a closer look before i started, and I probably would have gone with something more putpixelly and less blitty.

On the bright side, it was a good excuse to play with TileStudio and I figured out how to get maps of it and into lua. And it was pretty much the first time I’ve played with lua in years.

Anyways, the whole mess is here:

falling.zip

But it’s not worth downloading, unless maybe you want to use the .tsd file for tile studio.

Still, overall, fun idea and i like the contraints. I wish I had the full weekend to work on this. Next month, I’ve got LD17 blocked off on the calendar, looking forward to that.

There’s a few buggy bits, I somehow got it crashing when you try to do smooth scaling, the code became a beast and I have no idea how well it’ll run on other computers. Many more tweaks that could be made, but it’s done enough to throw it out there. It’s pong with fluid dynamics, kind of like plasmapong in that I used the same paper for the fluid dynamics code, however I tried to actually make the game side more pong-like and fun to play (I always found that plasmapong was beautiful to look at, but the game wasn’t exactly ‘fun’).

I did find out pretty quickly that even at low res, it’s probably not the best idea to do fluid dynamic simulation in a scripting language. Luckily the LuaJIT version of the engine that sfernald posted in this comment (you can download a bare version here, minus the example game) actually did provide a huge speedup and made it playable on my compy.

You can download the actual game code here, just throw the files in the same folder as the LuaJIT executable and run that. More tasty pixel fluid dynamics after the jump.

(EDIT: replaced rar after fixing a small problem, where it told you you lost when you won, and added 2 more palettes. On a side note, sometimes when running it goes very slow for me, in which case if I close and start again it’ll normally be fine)

P.S. SEKRIT CODE!

Didn’t get to work on this as much as I intended this weekend, but I like the concept so I”ll probably try to finish it later.  I’m fairly pleased with the progress but I’m embarrassed at how terrible the code got, and shocked at how quickly it got there. First thing when I resume, I think getting the bugs out of the cable code is going to require completely rewriting portions of it to be rational.

:edit: forgot to link the zip earlier. Click pic for download; includes the statically-linked win .exe, but the main.lua file should(?) run with any working retro setup. :edit2: smaller zip, omits RetroEngine.exe

Poached the concept from the #17 suggested themes… hopefully the theme won’t win, or I’ll end up feeling silly next month. Going to be a puzzle game where the player is working their way through a derelict ship trying to get it’s systems back online using only their collection of trusty Omnicables to transfer power, air, and fuel between systems.

Finally. Finished.

Now I know what I can accomplish in a 48 hour game, if I work all 48 hours without stopping 😉 That’s about how long I spent on this game.

Just so much artwork and logic, and starting from scratch with a language I had never used before. Still, I love how it came out. I didn’t think I could possibly do something so large-scale with the constraint of not only the framework and resolution and palette but of time as well. I went way over on not just time, but content size as well. Oh well, I’m just happy I finished.

Anyways, I really hope you enjoy it. It is complete and tested and I tried to put as much polish as time would allow. I think it is actually pretty fun and that is the important thing. Let me know how you like it, it was so much work to do all the artwork and animations.

I suggest you play in fullscreen or at least as large a window as possible on your system, and use your gamepad for the true retro experience. You will enjoy it much more. The 640×400 fullscreen batch file works fine on my netbook and it is plenty fast.

So who would win in a battle between a warrior and a wizard? Why don’t you give it a try and find out…

(REVISION 1.1:  Shortens death animation delay and changes vest color so you don’t blend into background)

http://www.bitjets.com/wizard.zip

keyboard control: left arrow and right arrow to move, up arrow to jump and control to attack.