Ah to be finished with yet another LD. It feels good. My entry is called Eyelands . Basically you are a guy stranded on a large island in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of angry natives.  The idea at the beginning was for it to be a very open-ended game that would be fun to explore and discover stuff. It still has some of that but not nearly to the level that I had envisioned.  Anyway, should you decide to play it, try to hang on for at least 2 minutes (the day to night cycle time in the game).

My Entry for LD17

Congratulations to all who entered!

Here’s my timelapse for the weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytucXyhmyA

My finished entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1066

I’ll probably write a post-mortem this week.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you on the MUD.

Tags: timelapse

I wasn’t able to finish implementation of much of my game, but I was pleased that I persevered and delivered something. It was nice to be able to make something less scruffy in terms of artwork, and I had fun LDing in a social environment.

Yeah, I’m a few minutes late – but in my defense, those last few minutes were linker errors. In my mind, I made a game in under 48 hours so I win.

Of course there’s no winning condition in the game, but still.

Hosted here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50837/LD17.zip

That’s the source code and .exe. Have fun!

A randomly-generated map.

A very basic title screen.

Sorry, I didn’t report any progress on day two. But I’m gonna write a post-mortem and upload my timelapse as soon as possible to make it up to you guys. I was nearly giving up until about 6 hours earlier, but my motivation returned after I finally got my robot guy to animate. So here is my entry:

It’s Windows-only at the moment (source included in the ZIP file), I’ll try to make ports for Linux and Mac OS X (Intel only) available in the next 12 – 24 hours, but I need some sleep first.
I didn’t have much time to playtest, so balancing might be a bit off and if there are any bugs let me know.

Tags: final

I managed to finish Voyage of the Queen.

I decided to try something 2D this time rather than my usual 3d to get something a bit more cerebral and less action.  It was written in silverlight which made it really easy to make nice GUI screens but I was doing low level blitting to do the boat sailing graphics. I had more plans for this game such as gaining crew, having more events other than pirates and upgrading the ship but the tile engine took more time than I thought and I didn’t really get around to the actual gameplay until Sunday. It was a little scary at the end because I had a really obtuse error message (Thanks Microsoft) that resulted in crashing at the trade and ship cargo screens about an hour before finish but I managed to fix it in time.

My compo entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1128

I didn’t have time to put a tutorial into the game, so I’ll explain a few things here for those having trouble.

1) On the map, we have a number of islands with one or more bases on each. The size of the base plays a bit of a role in its economy.

2) At any base, you can buy and sell any of the four commodities. When an island has commodity icons on it, those resources are cheaper at all bases on the island. Buying commodities drives up their price at that base, while selling them drives it down. The effect is bigger at smaller bases – big bases have more inertia.

3) The prices of commodities fluctuate randomly around a certain midpoint. When a base blinks green, the prices there have been updated.

4) You can mouse over a base to compare its (sell) prices to those at your current location. Clicking a base makes it your destination.

5) Having selected a destination, you can choose a mode of transport to get you there. More expensive modes of transit are more reliable (fewer breakdowns), more secure (fewer pirates) and/or faster. Only aerial modes of transport can get you between islands.

6) Pirates become more common later in the game, so you don’t get too screwed early on. If hauling a load of minerals in the late game, though, you’ll want to take a tank or rocket.

7) When time runs out, you’re allowed to reach your destination (if in transit) and will automatically sell any commodities you’re carrying.

8) At the beginning of the game, you can only carry 4 units, but you can upgrade your carrying capacity. It gets more expensive the bigger you make it.

Better instructions will follow! Just rushing this out in time for the voting. Post any questions as comments and I’ll try to answer them.

Lots did not make it because of hilarious software shenanigans, but it’s here!

Featuring a mysterious historical protagonist and AWESOME GROUNDBREAKING evolutionary mechanics.

Also featuring: not music because I had something done in some weird format and Total Recorder exploded my computer.

I might add content later when the voting’s done. oh god the code is horrible Can’t wait to see what you guys have done.

Tools:

Flashdevelop

Flixel

Flan

sfxr

Photoshop

I finally added a main character to my game. It can’t do much, except walk around and jump (BTW: the jump sound is a glissando on my cello). The game isn’t finished unfortunately, you can’t complete it.

I also made some background music, using the sound samples I recorded earlier.

• Play the game here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/MonkeyIslands/
• Source code: http://sites.google.com/site/mikewiering/LD17_Wiering.zip

Tags: final

And that’s all I have. That and a bunch more islands I sketched.

After having given up early Saturday afternoon I decided to spend the rest of the weekend working on a non-LD project. But due to general lethargy that didn’t happen. Then after midnight Sunday morning, with less than 22 hours left in Ludum Dare I got my second wind and did a bunch of quick sketches of islands.

And then after sleeping I couldn’t seem to get anything done with them.

So it looks like LD 17 didn’t work out at all for me. Just couldn’t keep an idea solid enough to seem worthwhile I guess.

Cheers to all the people who finished something though.

I think I will try and get familiar with something other than C++ and SDL by the time LD18 rolls around. Flixel seems nice.

The Forgotten Isles is my entry for the second Ludum Dare challenge I participated in. It is a simple game to play, using only the arrow keys to move your character around the island. Frustration will set in as you find out that the mazes become more and more complicated, but there is intrigue and mystery as to why you’re here.

This game has a lot to do with memories. As you wander the islands, you slowly lose more and more of your own. Some of them have manifested themselves in physical form throughout the mazes. These unintentionally serve as reminders of your past and help restore your memories, allowing you to continue to seek out an exit.

Lastly, the island itself doesn’t allow you to remember its own features, not for very long anyways. Terrain features only appear when you’re near to them. As you approach they’ll rise out up from the ground and when you walk away, they’ll disappear. This makes navigating a maze much more difficult.

The Forgotten Isles can be played on the web (Unity plugin) or downloaded for PC/Mac. Please take some time to explore the isles, and unravel the story.

Tags: final, screenshot

Well, it’s over.  That was great!  This game turned out to be fun, though a bit chaotic.  Check it out!

Not great quality, and as you can see I spend very little time with art assets and level editor. The video is only 1:09 long

Tags: LD17, screenshot, timelapse, Windows

My first LD game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1884

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLILo6ZVoag

So happy I finished this!
It’s my first Ludum Dare, tho I’ve wanted to enter for a while. I’m on a new PC, so I had to download a lot of tools during the contest, which was quite annoying. Other things I’d do next time are:

• Get food in the house first! I survived on eggs and toast alone
• Plan tasks before starting
• Get a good idea?

I started off with few ideas, and hoped if I made a game jumping from island to island I could expand upon the theme a bit. I expanded on the game play, but the island theme itself was never explored any further, which is a little disappointing.

I’m glad I managed to do a title screen and music (first music I’ve done for a looong time), and the game has a sort of ending. I managed to work quite quickly as I stuck to a low resolution and only 16 colours. It’s a palette I’m quite used to, but I had to make some adjustments to add a skin tone in half way through drawing.

Off for some much needed sleep now!

This was a really strange LD for me. I had no Internet all weekend – it was like the eighties, except with Flixel. Without IRC and blogs, making a game by oneself is very lonely; I don’t recommend it.

I learned Flixel over the weekend, and I now know that my brain is the Flixel-compatible type. The whole thing makes very good sense to me and feels familiar. It’s interesting that everyone seems to fall distinctly into one of two camps, people who get Flixel and people who get FlashPunk. It would be interesting to investigate how these two classes of people are different, in ways other than programming. For instance, do we all like the same movies?

My game is called Intercontinental Drift, and it’s posted here. Please play it and come back here to leave comments. The game and I have been in isolation all weekend, and we both thirst for a little human contact.

I think the game is kind of interesting, though it is unpolished and pretty incomplete. I never got a chance to make music or expand the levels very much. As usual, I didn’t start actually churning out chunks of gameplay (levels) until the last few hours. I need to work on this for future LDs, because it’s the most important part.

Cheers!

Hamburger

Tags: drpetter, eighties, final, flashdevelop, flashpunk, Flixel, intercontinental drift, internet, isolation, lonely, musagi, psychology, sfxr

Now that was Ludum Dare 17! Everybody exhausted? There’s no time to be exhausted! It’s voting time!

As usual voting will last for 2 weeks. And with more than 200 entries, we can’t expect everyone to play everything. Still, everyone has been randomly assigned 20 games, so we ask that you at least play those. More would definitely be appreciated, and the the more games you rate, the higher your score in the “Coolness” category. For an example of final ratings, take a look at Ludum Dare 16’s results.

From the Wiki, the categories you’ll be rating games based on, and what they mean:

1. Innovation – The unexpected. Things in a unique combination, or something so different it’s notable.
2. Fun – How much you enjoyed playing a game. Did you look up at the clock, and found it was 5 hours later?
3. Theme – How well an entry suits the theme. Do they perhaps do something creative or unexpected with the theme?
4. Graphics – How good the game looks. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc.
5. Audio – How good the game sounds. A catchy soundtrack, suitable sound effects, voice overs, etc.
6. Humor – How amusing a game is. Humorous dialog, funny sounds, or is it so bad it’s good?
7. Overall – Your overall opinion of the game, in every aspect important to you.
8. Community – Journals, photos, timelapse video. Everything you do above and beyond just making the game.
9. Coolness – How many games you rated? Score a Bronze, Silver, and Gold by rating LOTS of games.

That’s all for now. Go vote!

Interesting Links: [ Torrent containing most of the entries ]
[ LD17 Keynote | Theme Voting Results | Leave us Feedback or Suggestions ]

Entry Here, Game Here (source currently available by viewing source and grabbing the js and css files.)

This time I tried to write a very simple game after failing with multi-bodied collision response and pixel-perfect collision detection in LD15.

Evil Lair Command is a variation on Missile Command where you defend your volcanic island lair from the likes of 007. Ripe for lots of humor that never made it in (see below).

I decided I really wanted to try HTML5’s Canvas despite having never worked in it before and not touching  javascript since 2007. I prepped myself for this challenge by blitting an image to a Canvas on Thursday.  The biggest hurdle (for me) was the fact that an image doesn’t load immediately upon setting its source. I was rewriting the image handling code up to about 15 minutes before the deadline because the old code was crashing when I added boat spawning. There’s still a lot of bad code leftover from the old image handling methods, like the initGameState which is now a NOP (thankfully it doesn’t crash anything and just silently moves on to the next state).

I also lost a lot of time yesterday when I got sick. I ended up sleeping several hours in the afternoon and when I was working I wasn’t concentrating that well.

Stuff that was planned but didn’t make it in:

• Water texture that I spent more than 3 minutes creating.
• Laser graphics.
• Explosions.
• Minions (lives). Each time a boat hits the island a named minion would be lost protecting the island from a named government agent.
• Increasing difficulty as time progresses instead of just throwing a mass of boats at you in the beginning and spawning a new boat at a more-or-less constant rate (it’s a constant rate that’s perturbed by a random variation).
• Sound effects (including Evil cackles).
• Game restart that’s not triggered by clicking. Because it’s annoying to be trying to click on a boat just before it “reaches” the island, only to find you’ve started a new game.

Oh well, I have all the time in the world to add those features now. =p If I do, I’ll probably post a link to it from the Game Site, leaving the LD17 entry where it’s at for judging.

– Micah

ok so in Ludum dare 16 I threw out the idea of trying to beat all the games entered by the end of the 2 week rating period and I’m having the contest again.

Rules:

1.  Beat the game and collect all the secrets  (if it is possible to)

2. rate and comment on the game (this is always possible to do)

There will be no prize for this contest. If you don’t know which game to beat first you could always start with mine. It’s easy because I failed to make enough levels. (only 2 levels total.) Good Luck.

(Also…) I forgot to include my source code when I submitted. How do I go about adding it?

Can we get a sound off on how everyone enjoyed their LDs? Personally, I had a blast and learned more about programming in the past 48 then the past 2 weeks. If you learned something, or something held you back, state it here!

Alright, so this was my first experiment with timelapsing (I used chronolapse). I used 120 seconds per picture, so it’s sorta choppy, and I missed a couple hours when I forgot to turn chrono back on, but it’s definitely a cool way of seeing how you work.

LD17 Timelapse \”Island Hopping\”

Done! My first 3D game ever. I’m tired but happy about it.

Entry is here, for GNU/Linux and Windows.

Arks of Mercy

Be the savior of an endangered nation, as the level of the waters rise ineluctably. Guide your people to the safest mountains, build boats, teleportation towers and mighty shelters before it is too late!

Be sure to read the readme. It might not be very complex, but there are no instructions ingame at all.

EDIT: the readme might not be totally clear, but you can change the whole keymapping (not only for the gamepad) in keymap.lua

Be sure to check the Gameplay video!

Also, no Windows binaries yet, sorry. Will work on it, but I don’t have a Windows computer right here.

EDIT: ported!

Since this is clearly going to be an all nighter, I might as well do the traditional postmortem right away.

What went wrong

• It’s not exactly “code” related, since the code is portable (both the C library, and the Lua “game”), but having issues with the Windows port is annoying. My library is probably very easy to compile on Windows, but crosscompiling is a nightmare. Will try to get access to a Windows machine soon. EDIT: done!
• Having — as usual — no idea whatsoever where to start, I built the game a bit randomly, throwing ideas and seeing what would happen. In the end, the code is so  messy that I couldn’t do what would have given the true meaning of the game: having a second player. Be it computer, or networked friend. The game is a kind of single-player training mode. The goal is to score a maximum of points. I’ve never been very fond of these “gradual” winning games. Being able to compete on the same terrain with someone else, and check who saved most, would have been great. Later work maybe?
• First time use of 3D. We’ve been warned, know the technology before using it in a limited time compo… Even if I had gone through the Redbook before, and had the library set-up done, a lot remained to learn or relearn. And a lot of time spend (not lost) on it.
• Stupidly spent a huge amount of time on the terrain generation. Tried and failed at midpoint displacement, fractal watchamacallit and other things. Tried three times to implement Perlin noise before succeeding. I guess being tired didn’t help. Or trying to tweak parameters that I knew would be irrelevant later anyway.
• Considering the game not being truly a “game”, I didn’t do any intro screen or background story, or levels, or campain. For a while I considered it a fancy toy.
• Spent far too much time playing the game. Hey no wait. That’s a good thing. It goes into:

What went (very) well

• Despite the few previous points, I actually enjoy playing the game. I spent a few times playing it through and saying to myself “oah that game is cool”. And that is pretty new. All my previous LD’s and mini LD’s left me with a certain feeling of frustration. And the impression of having made a non-fun game. This one keeps me glued to the screen, gamepad in hand, until the end. And this, for the following reasons:
• 3D coding turned out great. Sure there were a few facepalms, a few unfindable bugs, and a few mathematical challenges. But I am happily surprised to see how far a “first 3D game” can go. Plus, I was afraid of performance, since optimisation is excluded during 48h (octrees? meh… i just draw everything all the time!), and my EeePC is kinda slowish and doesn’t have a gamer’s graphic card. But with a bit of Level of Detail, and basic use of Display Lists, I end up having ~14 FPS, which makes it very playable. People with better machines will enjoy it even better.
• 3D looks turned out nice. With the obvious intent of having minimalistic models, no textures, flad shading, etc, it ends up being slightly retro. It’s been compared, obvious inspiration, to Darwinia (never played), which looks infinitely more fantastic. With the day/night cycle and the zoomable camera, there are some pretty nice landscapes ingame.
• Music. I needed a break from the code at some point and decided to make music, even for a non-game. I’m quite happy with the result, a dark atmospheric track that certainly sets the mood to this doomsday setting. Actually, it is probably for a big part in how compeling I find the game. It keeps you anxious and willing to save those little yellow guys, who keep dying. Oh nooo!
• My small brave library keeps working fine, and get additions every time. This compo was the inaguration of the new input system. It’s not perfect yet, but served its purpose well. I loved playing with the gamepad.

I realise I haven’t listed the tools I used, as it is tradition:

• EeePC 901, mouse, gamepad. A weebit smallish screen for some things (the art department), but otherwise quite ok for coding.
• Lua (mostly), C (a bit in the lib), in the geany text editor. F5 runs the game (or any command you need). Some autocompletion. Doesn’t get in my way. I am not as enthousiastic as usual about Lua, but it’s probably only because of the awful coding practices of the week end. Very ugly.
• LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio) and the marvelous ZynAddSubFx, included in it. LMMS is not great, but good enough, and mostly makes a good front end to synths, samples players, trackers all in one. On the Eee, there’s not enough raw power to run jack and half a dozen sound apps at the same time
• Wings3D for the models. Curiously I knew very well how to use it, while I never really did that much 3D before. Very easy to use indeed.

Conclusion

I’m both very surprised and very glad of the final thing. Sure it could have been more (2 players vs/coop mode?), but I do enjoy playing it as it is, and that’s a very good sign.

Now I’d really like to hear what others think of it (agree, differ on the yes and noes). It’s one of the first games I’d actually consider finishing later. Cleaning code, adding modes, etc. Who knows.

Thank you reader if you managed so far,

and good voting!

Tags: final, postm, screenshot

Look at that, it has a name now.

Ok, so since I last made a post a lot has changed. The AI now makes ships and does stuff. the units and cities now look like units and cities. there is a bit of a user interface for current gold and unit creation. Paths are simplified to diagonals after they have been determined. Also, some minor tweaks all over.

Grab it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1168

I mad a timlaps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r-Ha9IFKHU

I edited out a couple hours (frames) of sleeping and eating.  It’s kind of fast and strobey.

Well, for only having been able to work on this for 12 hours, I think I did a pretty darn good job. I used JPixel again (as I mentioned before), which basically has support for OpenGL, pixely particle effects, and a lot of other junk.

Okay, I admit it, I was banking on “Escape” when I came up with my game idea. Therefore I will admit that the only thing that this game really has to do with islands is that it randomly takes place on one. I really would have loved to be more original here and go with the actual theme, but I was very short on time (12 hours was even far more than I suspected) and having spent 3 of that drawing the characters I had to go with I had planned. I already had design docs written up and all that beforehand and this sort of game really uses JPixel well, so that’s that.

Anyway. In Zombie Grinder you are running from a horde of zombies! I thought it would be fun to do an escape-type fighting game where you’re not limited by hit points. So, in this you can’t die unless you touch the horde on the left side of the screen. As such, even though you can be attacked by up to 50 enemies at once (I limited it because any more might slow down older systems), as long as you can stay on the right side of the screen you’re pretty safe. Turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.

I coded all the characters using the same base class, and gave the AI the ability to compare “factions” for who they wanted to attack. This ended up giving the awesome side effect of being able to drop in allies (same faction as the player) with very little fuss. All I had to do was draw a new character (or just tint the player’s guy, of course). This adds a very cool element where you’re running madly from these zombies and you can have some dumb friends drop in and distract some of the zombies. I really would have loved to play on this mechanic more but obviously didn’t have the time.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. It’s a simple little time waster that does, more or less, what I went for. And the number of moves you can do, along with the complexity of the combat system, is pretty awesome. My big disappointment is that I didn’t finish doing weapons in time – trust me, they would have been awesome.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think.  This could use a lot more work and quite a bit more polish (worst backgrounds ever!), but hey we can’t have everything. And don’t worry about losing – you can’t!

PS – Yes indeedy the gameplay and characters are inspired by River City Ransom.

My favorite screenshot

Lots of zombies and a few allies

My entry is up!

Play Pee Wee Pirates

Between this and Game-in-a-Day, I’ve done this kind of weekend “game jam” thing probably 10 times now (yikes). But this is the first time in a couple of years, so I was a bit rusty going in. I also decided at the last minute to go with an alpha-quality development framework that had some serious limitations.

Despite all that, though, it was fun to work on, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. Now I’m just looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with. =)

Thanks to everyone who organized the event!

Oh well my weekend plans were devastated by personal issues 😛 but in the last 6 hours I was able to put together a game, a little bit different from my original idea, that really sucks.

have fun shooting some monsters and defending the island !

Tags: devastated, islands, late, Shoot

Haven’t played too many of the games yet, partly because of being stuck playing Hempuli’s Paradise Fort and having too much fun.

Anyway, the tower:

Note the damaged sections where it was HIT BY METEORS!!!

Then after a while longer the rains came, and I looked awawy for too long as the water level rose:

I fixed three critical bugs:

The new version has already been uploaded. Get it here.
As for the Mac and Linux ports, I’m having a bit of a problem with the Mac port, so it might take a bit longer than expected. But you can always try to compile the source for yourself.

I have uploaded the timelapse on Youtube: Watch it here.
Gameplay and walktrough video will follow as soon as I have the Mac port ready.

I’m still a little bit sleepy, but I wanted to fix those bugs as soon as possible. And because I hacked the game together in such short time I didn’t care about memory resources and stuff you need a relatively fast computer to run (works fine on my Macbook Pro in a virtual machine, but sometimes lags on my Single-core Atom 1.6 GHz Nettop).

Read on for the post-mortem.

Personally I didn’t like the theme that much. First of all, because I used islands in my LD #16 game, in several other prototypes and couldn’t really find an idea that would be different from them. I had several ideas in my head, such as “You are the island”, some kind of Project Nomads game in which you have a floating island, build towers on your island and battle other islands, a RPG-like game where you go from island to island solving different quests and finally the survivor idea.
I went with the latter because I thought I can pull that off in 48 hours. The plan was to make kind of parody game, I don’t know if you can already tell in the status the game is now in. I planned a nice little intro, where you definitely get the idea that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it got cut due to lack of time.

I nearly spent the complete first day on graphics and I could have been more productive. The most productive time for me was the last nine hours before the deadline. The actual gameplay got finished the hour before the deadline, so there wasn’t a a lot of time left for playtesting.
Still, this is the most finished LD game I made yet, you actually have around 20 minutes of gameplay. Well, allright, that depends if you are exploring the world, building stuff or just focusing on the goal.

The Good

The Bad

What I’m planning to do for next time?

All in all, it was fun as always and I can’t wait to play all those games.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

I mentioned in my final I’m-Just-Gonna-Write-This-Then-Go-Pass-Out post that there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to write up but was too tired to at the moment. So:

Yesterday afternoon/evening was a real struggle. I’d done most of of the level design by then (a pretty herculean task in it’s own right), and early afternoon wrote two lists of the things I needed to do to make it a game, and the things I wanted to do to be happy with the result.

The first list read:

• Finish level design.
• Put in overarching game logic.
• Add intro and ‘outro’.
• Test that all orbs are reachable.

The second read:

• Add sound.
• Add music.
• Add ‘epilogue’ levels
• Add map
• Add sound + music toggle buttons.
• Add reset button
• Save game progress to cookies
• Test Test Test.

.. and I only had about 12 usable hours left. Obviously my work was cut out for me. So I put some music on, stopped blogging, stopped eating (not wise, I just forgot I needed food) and got my head down.

Somehow I managed to get everything on those lists done aside from progress saving (oh and possible one or two of the three ‘Test’s). Hard, but, I think/hope it was worth it.

Isles of Color

Just worked out that I spent approx 18 hours each day actually working, so, 36 total, ouch! Had a really brilliant time though, cheers everyone for making it the event that it is, particularly everyone on irc. Being able to chat to people going through the same stuff really buoyed me up when I needed it most.

There’s a timelapse video coming (it should be moderately entertaining as I spent so much time on level design), and I’m sure I’ll write up a proper postmortem at some point once my thoughts have settled a bit. Will have to get voting too, over 200 entries!? jeez!

Here‘s the timelapse video of me making Jump Pirate. I think there’s a frame (at about 1:37) of the final screen with “0 deaths” written on it, but that was a (subsequently fixed) bug, unfortunately.

Game Link – Timelapse Link

Lucky I decided to submit the game when I did, I fell asleep almost right away after and didnt wake up till a few hours after the deadline had passed 😀

Tags: timelapse, unity

More details on my entry here.

It seems some people are having bother running this on XP – I built it on Windows 7 and it seems the error comes from a handler that is in msvcrt.dll on vista/7 but not on XP.

I will try to get an XP build done as soon as I get home from work today. Anyone who is rating my game and can’t get it to run, I beg you to bare with me today and I’ll sort it out.

Thanks,

Grieve

After having spent most of the development time on my game, I realized that I’d been making the same game over and over again, and got very tired of it. My game was yet another crappy sidescrolling platformer, and I got very tired of it.

So… I threw in the towel, but didn’t tell anyone ’till now because I needed the time to relax. It hurt giving up yet again, but I just couldn’t stand to work on my idea anymore.

See ya next month for the Mini-LD, though. I’ll try to do something new and weird, because I can’t stand the idea of doing another platformer.

Here’s hoping…

–Mr.Dude

I fixed a bug that showed up when exiting the game (in both the “exit game” command and when you enter the cave (with all puzzles completed). It was a misuse of the exit() that apparently works fine on my Python, but when creating the binary it didn’t work anymore.

I kept the original sources so you can compare what I changed (just 2 lines really, an import sys and a sys.exit(0) instead of just exit()).

I’ll save my post mortem to after I make (off-competition of course) the last area of the game.

Thanks for the compliments on the game.

PSnake

Doing this now, because the longer I leave it, the less chance I’ll ever write it up.

I’ve uploaded OSX and Linux/source code versions.  These ones have the stupid bug where you could click on buoys before you’d found them fixed (thanks TFernando ), but I left the Windows version as it is, since that’s how I submitted it, and it’s not a huge bug.

Timelapse is here.  I’m afraid it’s missing the music making though, since I did that on a different computer and forgot to record a corresponding timelapse.  Post mortem after the jump:

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, though having made the map first, I don’t think the rest of the game really lives up to its watery-coloury beauty.  This was my 4th Ludum Dare, and I think I’ve found my feet now; the 1st one I started off really excited and enthusiastic, but the final slog to get the game finished really took it out of me; the 2nd one was the exact opposite – I hated the theme but got really excited towards the end.  This one was much calmer – I never really felt under pressure, and the whole thing went pretty much to plan.  I wasn’t too happy with the theme though – Islands (like Caverns and Exploration) is too expansive, imo.  Creativity is stimulated most when it’s working within constraints, and as a theme, Islands isn’t much of a constraint.

Anyway, the game:

What went well:

• The map, the clouds.  Really pleased with how these turned out.  I couldn’t have produced a better effect had I been given a month to work on them.
• Also, the font.  Credit goes to a Mr. William Boyd.  I found the font at dafont.com.  A good font makes all the difference.  Oh, actually, I didn’t break the rule of only using your own assets, did I?  I wouldn’t really expect many people to make their own fonts for Ludum Dare.

What went wrong:

• I think the game may be a little too obtuse.  If you’ve played Weird Worlds etc. you’ll know what to expect (minus the space battles), but I don’t think the game really makes clear that you’re supposed to die frequently and start over.  Certainly, even if you win on your first play-through, you’ll miss clues and stories(?) due to the random number generator only picking a handful of the possible options.
• Is it fun?  I suspect it’s possibly a bit too random to really be much fun to play.  In Weird Worlds you get into battles and have various strategies to maximise your potential gains, but there aren’t really many strategies in The Lost Hebrides (though the ‘divine’ button is there for a reason…).  Also, it’s the kind of game whose replayability would probably benefit from a score, but that would kind of work against the story/setting.  To be honest though, I was more interested in creating an atmosphere this time than making a really well-designed game.
• The cut-scenes.  I’m not happy with the way these turned out.  I don’t think they can remotely hold their own against the main map (map = kind of elegant; cut-scenes = clumsy children’s picture book).  It’s the black lines as much as anything, plus I don’t think I really used the watercolours to their fullest potential.

What could be improved:

• The writing.  There are parts of this I really like “She will return a thousand years old…” (though I stole that line), and I do like the main (folklore-ish) story, but a lot of it’s a bit clunky and could do with some editing.

Where the inspiration came from:

• Like I’ve said, rockettothesky‘s Medea album was a huge influence while I was making the game, and my aim was to make a game that had a similar atmosphere.  Also, the islander who tells you “She will return a thousand years old…” is quoting from a couple of songs on the album.
• Scottish folklore.  I have a slight obsession with creating games that reflect where I’m from, and this is probably the closest I’ve come to creating a properly Scottish game.  It seems to me that most games don’t really reference their geographical roots, instead choosing to engage solely with the kind of internet digital monoculture that we’re all part of now.  This game was an attempt to emulate the kind of storytelling you hear in Scottish fairy tales, stories that reference fairies and enchantment, and places like Land-under-Waves which can only be reached by certain paths.
• Weird Worlds/Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, natch.  I love these games.  Short play times, high replayability, not quite a roguelike…

I’ll finish with a picture of everything I drew/inked/painted for the game (barring the clouds, which are hiding under the watercolour pad.  There’s a bit of a spoiler if you’ve not won the game yet:

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

the game is hosted here:
link

http://vimeo.com/11231157

Well my entry would have been…

Energy Islands: Conquest

Green dot is your Marine Commando fresh from his drop pod!

In the not too distant future…

The droids and computers have rebelled and taken over our energy islands, it’s your job to get them back…

You have an aging carrier and a bank of cloned marine commandos!

What are you waiting for GO!

Note seems really slow/unplayable in IE, but works fine in Chrome and Firefox!

If I had managed to get the droid army to work right or just dropped them I might have made it under the wire!

Working Features..

• Island Missile Turrets
• Missiles
• Crarrier
• Drop Pod Marine Commando’s ;o)
• Bullets
• Swimming
• Island Hub Capture

Not working features..

• Droid Army – Used the Mode Bot as a quick drop in enemy at the last minute, but it’s angular thrust didn’t work and just sent them in a spin!

Keys ASWD – Space – LMB ;o)

Developed in Flash using the Flixel framework!

Uploading timelapse!

Timelapse – >48hr Time-Lapse

Hi guys/gals- I can’t find this question answered on the rules page and the submission guidelines page “doesn’t exist”: is it okay to upload ports after the deadline if the original submission was made on time? I submitted a Linux version on time but not a Windows version because I couldn’t get it running. This morning the solution came to me while I was shaving (lol)- I didn’t have the game content in the same directory as the executable, duh. Do you think it’s okay if I submit a Windows version now, since no code has actually changed?

Note the Windows 7 window decorations ^^

The game has been ported! Or more precisely the library behind it, since the game itself is purely in Lua.

Grab it from the entry page.

Remember to read the README, lots of nice info. Also remember that you can entirely change the key mapping if you don’t like the default one (see file keymap.lua)

Please consider rating the game if you already skipped it for non-Windowsness!

Have fun (hopefully)!

Tags: screenshot

Timelapse is up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHlXEjBDtNI

I’ve never uploaded anything to Youtube before — is it normal for it to decimate the quality like that? Oh well. You can sort of see what’s going on.

Also, I updated the source archive so it should build on Unix platforms now (That includes you, Mac users).  I’d compile it on my Mac for you but I can’t seem to get hold of SDL. Also it’s a PowerPC Mac so it probably wouldn’t even run for you.

Looking forward to playing the other 204 entries!

Edit: Ah, never mind. Just noticed: “Video quality my improve once processing is complete”. Here’s hoping!

Edit Edit: Also, if you’re interested, the source download includes the Ableton Live 8 project for the music and a couple of Photoshop PSDs.

Here are the time-lapses I did of my screen, divided into the two days.

Day 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jenOIEQt9Fk

Day 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMqPKhMHDvw

Please check out my submission here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1886
I’d love to know what you think of the code – the entire source is included!

(In case you can’t see the embeddation, follow This Link.)

So yeah, here it is! I’m overall very very happy about this Ludum Dare, and having already voted on some I see that there are plethora of great entries.

42 hours, 1 picture every minute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ_VKS0ptDI

Tags: timelapse

A lot of nothing going on in my timelapse I was quite lazy this week-end… v___v

Tags: timelapse

I made a no sound version of my game in case people don’t want to download the 35mb. Originally I just posted the no sound version on LD with the option to download a sound version, but I switched it around. Now the default is the sound version (if you click the built-in DL buttons) with an option further down in the post to get non-sound versions. If I had more time I would have pulled in a sound loader that allows compressed music, but I didn’t.

With sound:

http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ZombieGrinder/ZombieGrinder.jnlp

Without sound:

http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ZombieGrinder/ZombieGrinder-nosound.jnlp

How to play “Row, Fuck!!!”

I wanted to make this game hard to master and easy to learn.

The secret to play is to maintain a steady speed when the boat reaches “island crush” speed. For this, you have to keep pressing the keys at a slower rate only to dodge the indestructible island.

Gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRVnE2Fd_Zg

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1901

Here you go with a screencast. Also wanted to do a real timelapse, but my second computer didn’t want to take pics of me over time

Hi everyone, I have just discovered that the game build I submitted,only seems to work on a 64 bit pc.

Im working to try to get a 32 bit compatible version sorted, but atm unless you are on xp 64 there probably isnt any sence in trying to download it.

Has anyone else had an issue like this in the past?  if anyone has any suggestions They would be greatly appreciated,

thanks

I put the game content in with the Windows executable and, magically, the game runs now.  😉  So in addition to the Linux version, there’s now a working Windows version. I updated my submission.

Voting isn’t working for me. Anyone else have this problem?

I posted a new version with a couple bug fixes and some tweaks. You can find Forgotten Isles here, available on Web, PC and Mac.

Praetor57 says …

Cool art style, nice work!

Thank you!

shrt says …

Pretty nice tune. I really liked the disappearing/appearing terrain obstacles too.

I found the controls weird to begin with, since the character would not move according to the camera’s orientation.

Thanks. For LD18 I plan to get some “real” music. The terrain was my favorite to work on. I added in a shrub in the latest version to help demonstrate the controls from the beginning.

Endurion says …

More like a book than a game.
Navigating the maze was getting tedious near the end, also as others said: Why not move oriented towards the camera?

It is linear, but the game is the mazes. It does tell a story and there isn’t a score, but there are win/lose conditions. The second version makes exploring a bit easier, with an increased timer and the starting locations counting as checkpoints.

I will consider another version with the camera directly behind the player if it’s requested more. I liked the isometric view, I think it helps display the island, and reveal maze better.

As it is an hardcore game, you’ll probably appreciate a walktrough for the first level too.

– LEVEL 1 video –

To conclude, have a small island :


:waterlevel 6
:map
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooobooooooooooooooooooooooobooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo21ooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooxxooooooooooooooooooooo
oojoooooooooooooooxxxxxxooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooopoooojooxxxxxxxxxxooooooooloooooooo
ooooooooooooooxxxxxxxxxxxxxxooooooooooooooo
oooo3oo3ooooxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxooo3oooo3oooo
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Create a .txt file in the simplemap folder (with a name start with “0” to be sure it appears in the list) and paste this.

Giant grid of screenshots from all 205 LD 17 games!

205 screenshots + LD logo

Here are some wallpaper-sized versions:

• 640 x 480
• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 0960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1600 x 1200

EDIT: These ones add some space for your task bar.

• 640 x 480
• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 0960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1600 x 1200

Tags: grid, screenshot

So I hopefully fixed the strange bug happening on other computers. The game should actually be playable! I also fixed a stupid typo that was causing random errors.
Check it out!

The link to my entrys Windows download is now fixed..

sorry for any inconvenience!

Here goes my timelapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_tysE13HCs

From the two comments I gathered so far, it seems people have trouble with progressing to later stages. Let me recapitulate the controls (they are written in the titlebar of the window as well)

Arrows – movement

Enter/Space – use / talk

[] – cycle through objects in inventory

left shift – examine objects in inventory

I will be posting a video walkthrough  tomorrow as well.

p>

Here is the timelapse of my game, I hope you apreciate it as I wrote a 12-line custom c# application to generate input files so that mencoder wouldn’t crash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxngui36z64

If anything, this shows that watching to many full metal alchemist episodes in one ludum dare, will effect the overall quality of the game

If you tried playing my game, Hungry Hungry Castaways, and it would not run, it was probably because you did not have the Visual Studio Redistributable. I have fixed this now so you shouldn’t need it to run the game. If it still won’t work try downloading the Visual Studio Redistributable.

Hi Everyone, I have just rebuilt angry stan on a 32 bit os with another distribution of allegro,

it seems to have solved the problems, but I cannot be sure,  I am sorry about the problems, please feel free to grab the new version,  as it should at least run on more peoples machine now.

again a nice screeny for you all

oh and

I’m trying to play, but Stan falls through the island as if it’s not solid over and over at the beginning of the game. Is this a bug?

-Yes it is a massive bug and thanks for letting me know, something wrong with allegro, I think the new build has resolved this issue, I would appreciate it if you could redownload and try it again.

Hey all, the windows binaries seem to be…fixed. DLL’s being a nightmare, but running now…. I hope. I’ve also uploaded the Linux port – it assumes libglut will be on your system, if its not please ‘sudo apt-get install libglut3’ or whatever your prefered method of packet management is.

All files are available in the “Windows” zip on the page. Just run *.exe for win and *.sh for linux

Enjoy!

Oh and the story scrolls SUPER fast on linux machines, sorry about that. Not a “show-stopper” by any means so I guess I’m not allowed to fix it.

Grieve

The goal is to collect 25 starfish.
If you get stuck on an island, try scooting off.

I am working on making a torrent of all the windows versions of the LD17 games. It will be awesome, and I have to do it all by hand, so bear with me. It’ll be done by the end of today though, I promise!

My entry
Islands Far Away

“eat corky”
“I don’t suppose Corky would care for that.”

I wouldn’t recommend messing with Corky!

I found it hard to find the correct command and quit because the parser was such an obstacle.

Yeah, next game I’ll be sure to try to think of any responses that players might have to actions. I just didn’t have the time this time. I spent all my time just trying to learn Inform 7.

One of the funnier text adventures I have played this year 😀 Couldn’t quite finish it tho

Thanks, you should try to finish if you are close. The ending is the best part!

I couldn’t get anywhere. It’d be nice to get some sort of guide here! ;D

Yes, I agree. I have made a hint file. WARNING, THIS WILL RUIN THE FUN OF THE GAME. I would suggest using it only as a last resort.

Here is the hint file:

Hint File

Also, this game is actually better if you use a stand-alone program instead of the javascript version.  You can save your game progress, it is faster and you get better fonts among other things.

You can download the game file here:

Game File

Goodie. Capture rate: 1frame/minute, night time cut and run at 5fps. Video quality is crap, but eh. Nothing I can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjeU7ilMMmY

Tags: timelapse

http://destructogames.com/LD17-archives-win.torrent

It’s up. It’s all the windows links I could download, it’s just under 650MB, and it’s just windows games. Source if the games included it, otherwise just the game. Organized into folders labeled as such:

<creator> – <name>

eg:

demize – Horrible LD17 Game

Download it, hope you can get it because my connection is crap for uploading, and then rejoice as you SEED IT. SEED IT. and then SEED IT some more so everybody can have it 😀

EDIT: Some games may have bugfixes, for example pubby8’s game, Island Guns. This torrent should be fairly recent and stable, but if you experience any problems check the game’s page for bugfixes.

EDIT 2: Please be patient and download this. I’m initial seeding right now to get the initial distribution done as fast as possible, but my up speed seems to be less than 20kb/s. It’ll be done within the next day or so probably, then it’ll all be in the wild as long as you stay on. If you’re the only person with a piece and you stop seeding that piece, nobody can get it. So, please be patient and download it, and wait until there are a few seeds to stop downloading and just download them all yourself.

Just a note to let people know that I’ve linked packaged, double-click-it versions for Mac OS X and Windows on my entry page. The combination of libraries I used, and the limitations of my development environment, made this game somewhat difficult to package, so I’d appreciate some feedback letting me know whether or not the packaged versions work, particularly on different os/arch combos (like 32 vs 64 bit, Intel vs powerpc mac, etc).

(A note, for those of you who downloaded entires via bit-torrent, Capsize! didn’t make it into the torrent since the windows build wasn’t ready at the time).

I borrowed an iPhone to test Evil Lair Command and it almost worked. All the text was being displayed upside down inside and outside the canvas. The text that was still inside the canvas was flickering while the text outside wasn’t being “erased” each frame, so it just piled into a big smudge of pixels. The framerate was low and based on the FPS smudge I think it was single-digits low. And it was darn near impossible to hit any pesky agent boats, though I did accidentally hit one, so I know it’s possible. I think it could work if I could have some more time to work on it with a real iPhone, but I don’t want to buy an iPhone just for this silly game. =p Here’s some screenshots of the grand event.

Bottom line: don’t try to play Evil Lair Command on an iPhone (3GS to be precise) unless you’re morbidly curious. However, if you have an Android device or some other mobile device that supports the Canvas tag, I’d be happy to hear the results.

Download Here

Finally kicked that bug in the face.

More stable!

I’ll do a proper postmortem soon, I’m glad to have got it done even if it’s late, I managed to actually find myself having fun with it in the last few minutes, so that’s a plus. Enjoy.

This Ludum Dare was far more frustrating than the previous one.

My game idea was somewhat more ambitious than SEEK*TOR, but what really killed my progress was trying to use flixel for something it’s not suited for. I spent most of Friday and Saturday trying to bend and hammer flixel into doing what I wanted it to. I managed to code some work-arounds, but I felt like I was doing twice as much work as I should have been.

The game I wanted to make had you swimming around a world as an aspidochelone, or asp-turtle. You would start out small and eat fish and other sea creatures, slowly growing bigger. There would be ships and sea monsters floating around, which you could ram to make them drop their stuff if you were big enough. Once you got big enough, you could start picking up rocks to build an island on your back. With an island, you could pick up people and have them build a village on your back to help you out. There would be different resources that would encourage your villagers to specialize and give you different bonuses, like faster movement, stronger weapons, faster growth, etc.

The two features that I really had trouble doing in flixel were scaling and rotation (specifically, collision detection while scaled and rotated). Given that I had a turtle swimming around in a top-down view, growing as the game progressed, this made things pretty difficult. Also, I kept needing groups of things to move and rotate together, which FlxGroup isn’t quite set up to do. (FlxGroup is very good for pooling objects so you can re-use them. It’s not so good for moving multiple objects as a big chunk.) A minor annoyance that I kept encountering was the fact that it’s difficult to create an object that’s only for display and doesn’t have all the physics-y stuff attached.

With about 18 hours left, I finally decided to toss out flixel and write my own engine from scratch. That consumed the rest of Saturday and a big chunk of Sunday. Getting movement to work was no problem. Switching over didn’t take me too long either, since I tried to match flixel’s organization as I coded my engine. The real headache was getting collision detection and handling to work. I have variously had islands shoot off behind the turtle when touched, trap the turtle and prevent further movement, and stick to the turtle like glue.

So, I didn’t manage to finish my game. On the other hand, I now have a half-way decent first version of my very own game engine!

I have noticed in the voting list that there are strange bronze and silver medals next to peoples names. May i ask what they are?

Hey there,
I’m the author of Beebop The Island Hopper and this is my first Ludum Dare. Previously I’ve made a few entries for The Experimental Gameplay Project which is a monthly contest of creating a themed experimental game in one week but the challenge of making a game in only two days, and the pretty cool community, compelled me to join in this time.

The game itself is very simple: your only task is to press a button at the right time and advance to the next island but a press at the wrong time will push you back to the previous one. Although simple it was a surprisingly good concept and it did stole a few minutes of my time. The graphics turned out okay (thank god) but the sound is pretty damn awful.

The pressure with such a short deadline is no joke and although I didn’t have a lot of hours to spend, I totaled around 8 hours, I really did spend them effectively.

It was really fun and I learned a ton about programming, myself and getting things done. I will definitely try to participate the next time and then I’ll be more active on irc and to post at least once in the middle of the making.

Now all I need to do is to vote.

Cheers

“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”

Well not exactly my case but it’s better to commit and release than to never do so.  So without further ado, here’s my first game I’m releasing to the public.  Cargo Island Drop!

Why so late?

I entered the competition late and I was unable to actually work on the game Saturday.  I had planned on working in the evening but became ill after having the Crab Pad Thai at a friends birthday dinner.  I made a post on Sunday, two hours before the deadline, that I didn’t make it but I wasn’t going to give up so here I am.    I had some extra time today so I spent some making up the lost time from Saturday.  I did it for myself, I did it for those who believed in me but I also did it just to show the Ludum Dare community that you guys are awesome!  Next time I’ll do better planning.  Until then, here you all go!

Misc info:  Cargo Island Drop was built in Unity.  Modeling done in Blender.  Texture work done in Pixelmator.  The music was stock music but seeing as I didn’t have time to make any and it isn’t an official entry into the competition I decided to leave it.  Everything else was done by me, even the art!  First time I UV unwrapped anything that complex!

Web Version:  Cargo Island Drop Web (Unity Plugin)

Windows Version: Cargo Island Drop Windows

Mac Version: Cargo Island Drop Mac

Edit: DOH!  Forgot to include a link to the source:  Source

Please, if you use the source for anything please just drop me a message, I would love to know if it was useful for anyone!  Thanks!

Feel free to leave me any feedback!

I already posted a mini-postmortem in my submission screen, but here’s my expanded version.

First up, I want to give a big shout out to everybody who contributed to Ludum Dare, and to those who made this entire site and contest a reality.  It’s great to see so many people active a community focused on game development.  While this was my first Ludum Dare 48, I’ve participated in community-driven game competitions before and it’s always been a blast.  LD48 was no exception.

Here’s a summary:

• Lack of working debugger/inspector meant much gnashing of teeth.
• Unfamiliarity with Flixel library/AS3 specifics cost me time.
• Spent too much time getting art into a state that was usable.
• Generally spent too much time arguing with my tools, and not enough refining gameplay.

Friday:

The islands theme sort of threw me for a loop.  I wasn’t expecting it, and in fact had down-voted it. But, in retrospect, I admit it’s a good theme.  It’s open enough that people were able to do some really cool and interesting things with it.

After grousing over the theme for a bit and finally having a flash of inspiration, I sat down and sketched up concept art.  I half-expected it to end up as my final art, so I spent more time on than I might normally.  Later, I’m glad I did this.

Now I had a gameplay idea, concept, and a bit of art.  The next step was dumping the art into separate sprites and making sure they were properly configured to work in Flixel.  This part cost me a fair amount of time.  My original idea to use Cosmigo’s ProMotion and do strict pixel art would have been easier on my mouse-hand.

I then created a project in FlashDev and made sure that all of my assets would load up properly via Flixel.  After that, I coded the scrolling background.  My original sketch had everything on one screen, but I felt a bit constrained so I enabled a larger, scrolling playfield in order to make the game level more expansive.  However, I wasn’t able to properly enable the off-screen indicators for enemy islands/fireballs, so I felt that hurt the gameplay in the end by making the game a little confusing.  It would have just been simpler to keep everything on-screen;  Most of the levels I designed did this anyway.

The final bit I accomplished before turning in for the first day was to sketch the little animated islanders in Photoshop.  Photoshop is not meant for pixel art, I’ve found.  It’s incredibly annoying to use for this task.   More time wasted!  But once I was done, I had idle, running, swimming, burning, and praying animations.  This is all I needed from the little guys, so I could at least sign off on them.

After writing the Native class and making sure the little guys spawned properly, I decided to call it a night.

Saturday:

Ugh!  Nasty storms!  They kept me offline until later in the day.  Boo!

Once I finally was able to get back into my form, I started work on the most critical aspect of the game;  Animated fireballs that could be launched at the other islands.  This part was fun, but my unfamiliarity with Flixel started to rear its ugly head.  This resulted in some digging in Flixel code in order to grok the purpose of the FlxEmitter class and how to bend it to my needs.

Then, more time tweaking it so that I could have a dozen fireballs onscreen without grinding my system to a halt.  At the time, I was unaware of the profiling functions in Flixel, so I could have cut out some of the guesswork with this.

Next I finished the animation state code for the islanders.  They convincingly milled about on my islands, and occasionally went to their knees and prayed, but at the time this was just a visual effect.

The final thing I completed before calling it a night as implement the fireball arc code, so that they fell convincingly, and the collision code, so that the fireballs landed on the islands.  The collision code kept me up for a while.  There was some silly little overlooked error that prevented the fireballs from exploding properly.   I don’t even remember what it was, exactly.

Sunday:

Hoo boy!  Down less than 12 hours, I didn’t have a working game at all.  I just had pieces.

The spawning code for islands worked.  You could launch fireballs and they would impact the other islands, set natives into poofs of flame.  This was all fun, and such, but not a real game.

First up was writing the prayer-power system.  Islanders prayed, increasing power, which powered the fireballs.  I also coded the health/power bar system and drew two little Tiki heads to represent the gods.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to add in an expanded graphic of your islanders worshiping your Tiki (the horned red-eyed god), which would have clued a player in which of the two sets of islands they controlled.  (Hence the odd left gap in the dialog boxes, and the confusion some pointed out about where to aim the fireballs. :))

This was all cute, but disaster struck!  Sometimes, when destroying an island, my islanders would swim to a nearby island and join it (as intended).  However, they wouldn’t stop joining.  The game quickly crawled to a halt when over 50,000 sprites were rendered.  Oops!  A lack of a Flash debugger really hurt me here.  I wasn’t aware that the Flex SDK comes with fdb, so I had to debug the old fashioned way:  Hack and slash until the problem went away.  I eventually narrowed it down to a bug in the abandonment routine, which checked to make sure the islanders were swimming towards a still-existing island.

The final pieces were falling into place, but I was quickly running out of time.  I wrote a very simple AI, which simply only had one job due to unfinished game mechanics:  Select where to aim on the screen.  That wasn’t too difficult, but a subtle bug would later come to bite me concerning AI aiming…

There were two components left for what I considered a”complete” game:  The bumper code, which is my term for things like overall game state transition, level changes, and so on.  And the construction of at least three levels.

The bumper code wasn’t hard to write.  Just simple state transitions, a quick five minute title/won-the-game screen.  But this is when the subtle bug reared its ugly head.  I had less than 15 minutes to the deadline, but when you switched levels, the AI pulled a brilliant move of randomly flinging fireballs instead of aiming at the player-controlled islands!  Argh!

I went ahead and submitted the game as-is, not realizing that we are given a chance to fix such game-breaking bugs after the deadline.

I managed to find the cause of the bug a mere five minutes after I hit submit;  When changing level states, I wasn’t clearing the AI targeting parameters.  As simple as the AI was, it just targeted the same (now non-existent) island location as before.

This was due to oversight caused by my rushing.  Instead of taking the sane route of simply switching game-states between levels (and storing persistent info elsewhere), I tried to cram everything into the same state and just cleared the commonly data structures between levels.  I mean, the game isn’t that complicated, right?  This is where having no working runtime inspector/debugger really hurt me.

In Closing

All-in-all I had a blast!  And the resultant game is, IMHO, worthy of pursuing as its own complete project entirely outside of LD48 even if it doesn’t come close to winning.  I couldn’t ask for more!

See all of you next time.

Tags: LD17, postmortem

TAB: Island Rescue (LD17)
By: Fydo

I dunno if anyone cares, but for the guitar enthusiasts in the compo, you might enjoy a tab of the song I made for Island Rescue.


/ = Slide
~ = Vibrato

------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
-----5-------------------------5----------
---7---5-/-3-/-5-/-3-/-5-----7----5~~-----
-5-------------------------5--------------

------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
-----5------------------------------------
---7---5-/-3-/-5-/-3-/-5--5-/-7-/-5-/-3---
-5--------------------------------------5-

------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
-------10------------------------------10-------------------
----12----10-/-8-/-10-/-8-/-10------12----10~-10-/-12-/-10--
-10------------------------------10-------------------------

-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
-------10--------------------------------------------
----12----10-/-8-/-10-/-8-/-10---10-/-12-/-10-/-8----
-10-----------------------------------------------10-

So, a small collection of post-compo stuff here, timelapse, post mortem + bugfixes.

My timelapse is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ2UFsvPK4k if anyone’s interested. Looking back I spent a *lot* of time creating levels, but I kind of knew that already. It’s kind of fun to see them grow, though with the benefit of hindsight, taking more screenshots, and producing a ‘highlight reel’ after the event would lead to a more satisfying video.

What went right:

Had a clear design idea. I was lucky enough to start Saturday with a very clear idea of the game I wanted to achieve. It was (overly) ambitously large, and relied on being able to do a large amount of decent level design in a short space of time, but having such a clear vision of what I wanted kept me on task, and prevented me from wasting much time simply trying things out.

In-engine editing. I’ve been converted to the idea of doing level design in game ever since playing around with Cube god knows how long ago. So early on I wrote a system to support editing of levels without leaving the game (I didn’t even have an edit mode to flick into, editing happened literally at the same time as playing). There’s simple no way I’d have been able to design as many screens as I did if I’d had to keep flicking between level editor and game (or, worse, text editor and game).

Simple mechanics that interacted nicely. The 3 core mechanics (springy things, ice, and rocks) were chosen mostly on a “what can I implement quickly” basis, but I was very happy with how well they ended up slotting together.

What went wrong:

Too damn big. Whilst having a clear idea was great the specific idea I had committed me to making waaay more content than was comfortable within the timescale. There are 40 screens in the final game, and nearly as many puzzles, and this is *after* I’d scaled back my original vision significantly. I took a huge chunk of total time, probably approaching 8 hours on pure level design. I ended up having to cut other things I wanted to put in (extra animation, localised fauna etc.) as a result. Having said all that it was really cool to realize something on that scale.

My music is dull, repetitive and quickly annoying. Just a combination of of it being a generally a weak area for me, and having very little time to burn on it (1hr fairly late into Sunday, when I was completely knackered). I came very close to not bothering including music at all though, so I guess overall I’m glad I managed to put something in. More practice required before next time though.

Less testing time than it could have done with. There ended up being some significant and unpleasant glitches (infinite-loops, an inescapable area etc.) that I just didn’t have enough time left to find. Ties pretty heavily into the “too damn big” point, with that much content there’s going to be problem areas, and it’s going to take hours to find them.

Not taking Monday off work. Simple, but regrettable, trying to do a full days work after a 36hr game development marathon was not fun!.

So, all in all, I shot pretty high, way too high in fact, so it feels pretty great that I managed to realize my original idea fairly convincingly.

The glitches + bugs have been annoying me a lot, so I’ve been working on a fixed up version, available to play at http://jwhiting.nfshost.com/ld/17/islands_better.html. So far it has fixes for all the specific glitches people have reported (thanks for the info!), as well as a few I found myself. Also I’ve put in code so that if anyone does run into an icky infinite loop situation it should at least recover from it fairly gracefully. I also plan to add some sort of progress saving system, so that it doesn’t have to be completed in one session.

Anyway, that post was pretty epic all told, congratulations if you made it to the end

Now I’ve just got a lot of games to play 😀

I enjoyed the compo thoroughly, and I was so happy with my entry that I’ll sure keep working on it! I’ll probably add more enemies, cannon types and such stuff, along with online highscores. You can see some of the new enemies in that screenshot – the Poison Bomber, and the Balloon Bombs.

Here is the promised gameplay video: Click here

I also added builds for Linux and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X build is a bit slow at the moment, there are some issues with the texture loader which I need to rewrite for Mac OS X in the near future.
Anyway, the links are on my entry page: Click here

Thanks to everyone who played and commented on my game.

Another great weekend. Ludum Dare is such a special event. You go into it knowing it’s going to be a boatload of work. You know you’re going to lose sleep and probably not eat very healthy. But all the pain and suffering is over in 48hrs and all you’re left with is a game you made yourself.

Play > Ludum Dare Build
Watch > Time-Lapse Video of Development
Link > Ludum Dare #17 Vote Page

Concept Discovery:

LD #17’s theme ended up being “Islands”. To say I was unprepared for this theme choice would be an understatement. I spent the first hour sketching out possible ideas. None of them were really resonating with me. In the back of my head I really wanted to make a Roller-Derby themed game so I decided to shoe-horn it into the “Islands” theme. I talked over the concept with Melinda during dinner and committed to the idea of a Roller-Derby themed side-scrolling, platformer, “chase” game. My technology of choice was Flixel.

Flixel:

In all my previous Ludum Dare entries I’ve used my own custom libraries with the standard Flash Professional IDE. This generally meant a lot of copy and pasting code snippets and writing up simple classes from scratch. After LD #16 in December I started learning Flixel along with Flash Builder. I hadn’t yet built anything to the complexity I was going to attempt with my LD#17 project.

Flixel did not disappoint. It was extremely easy to work with and iterate rapidly within. I had a side-scroller with enemies and dynamically generated platforms within only an hour or so. I’d never used the FlxBlock object before, but these handy items created my random, dynamically generated world.

I actually found I had far fewer excuses to hide in my code. The stability and ease of building my tech meant I was forced to spend far more effort on art and gameplay tweaks. It’s way easier to put off making better art if there’s a tech bug to squash.

Art:

I really really pushed myself here. I really don’t think I’m a good artist when it comes to drawing things. It took a butt-load of effort to start drawing out the roller-girl sprite sheet. I don’t think my sprites turned out very good, but I’m just impressed that I managed to get them to the level they are at.

My background tiles I’m a lot happier with. I used some reference shots from MegaMan 6 and basically copied the lighting techniques pixel by pixel.

Using the typical NES Palette was also something I’ve wanted to do in a long time. It took a bit of trial and error over the weekend to get my Photoshop workflow down such that I was always exporting .png files with exact NES colors. I’m particularly impressed with my title screen which has a photo of me (taken on Sunday morning).

Pressure:

I barely felt pressure this weekend. The confidence of working from a strong codebase with so few unknowns meant I was rarely in the situation of having crazy annoying showstopper bugs. I kept my scope very tight figuring it was better to polish something small than to overreach. In the end I decided to submit about 4hrs before the competition end time.

I mainly stuck to my typical schedule of Concept Discovery & Prototyping on Friday night, Production on Saturday, and Polish & Tuning on Sunday. This has worked well for me on two LD48 entries now.

Overall:

I got to do a lot of new things this weekend:

• Build a platformer
• Complete a reasonably sized project in Flixel & FlashBuilder
• Go outside my comfort zone with pixel art
• Play with the NES Pallette

I did all of this without stressing too much or hurting my brain nearly as much as LD #16. I wasn’t taking the game too seriously either (as you can probably tell) so I had a hell of a lot of fun just making it as absurd as possible.

My end game barely connects to the theme of “Islands” so I’ll most certainly take a points hit there. But I do feel pleased in the fact that Roller-Derby 20XX: Mega Islands of Awesome is quite fun!

When is LD #18 again? What? Not till August? Booo…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=2096

Banana Joe is a simple platform made in flash cs3 and paint.net

Do you like Pirates ? Pay attention to crabs and bats.. the are nasty!

Maybe I’m just being anal here, but the rules of the competition clearly state that

1. All content must be created during the compo
2. Source code must be provided

There are still occasional entries with images obviously taken directly from the web.

And in many entries, the source is forgotten (ignored?). Some even claim proudly that their game is closed soure…

I know it’s an honor system, and it is very unlikely that people will actually check your source for copy pasted code. But how long can it take to zip your project folder and upload it along? You can even just put it in a single archive with the compiled game if you can’t be arsed to make two different zips.

Now it’s too bad because the game are good. But how should these be judged? They should theoretically be disqualified. Should they receive N/A, or minimal grade on Overall?

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t pay attention to that aspect, but somehow it’s bugging me. Has an admin advice on the conduct to take?

Okay the title sucks but I invented it as I was drawing it for the main screen. Since it was an image I was too lazy to change it later.

The game was made with ruby 1.9 (very cool language) and gosu (very cool hardware accelerated library). I personnaly think it is a much better alternative to python/pygame mostly because its faster (forget about doing side scrollers with only pygame).

So, first LD for me (but who cares). I decided not to make an engine from scratch to be faster, so I used mine. I needed to make some improvements , like for example , the introduction of water.

But it took much more time than I tought. And the final result is far from being polished. I think a game like this requires too much polishing because there is some kind of physics , AI and a gameplay to balance.
My next game will be something more predictable. I plan to make an adaptation of a board game. It will be turn based and won’t need drawing skills of death to do something okay.

About the gameplay of the game :

The idea was to make something between “evo the quest for earth” and “super mario” but more nervous, a la “sonic”.

For the aquatic part , you’ll have noticed that the bite attack is pretty useless , because you can’t hit without being hit. In evo your caracter can attack farther than the size of its body. I could have changed it but that would have been too strange that your enemies have a much shorter attack range. And the idea was to make the aquatic part depends of what you do on land. So I introduced the bonus (things you can throw at your enemies while in water). They encourage exploration.
But you can attack the jellyfishes.

The land crushing attack is not working so well because enemies often have the time to attack you before being crushed. You really need to land straight on them , in spite of my effort to increase the size of your hitbox when you are crushing something.

The game seems to be very hard , but it’s on purpose : Without the fast brown fishes , you wouldn’t have to be creative and find a way to progress. This makes the game less linear.
The most obvious way to beat the fishes is collecting items.
You can also jump on them by doing an exploit that consists of taking speed by going down then moving up and jumping out of the water , as they are down (see the videos).
You can stick very close to the spikes so they die trying to get you , like in this picture :

Theses “features” were not really done on purpose , but they add something to the game.

REMINDER – Level 2 walktrougth : http://www.youtube.com/user/Ickylevel#p/a/u/2/vI5h5vlD0KE

YARGH! Post Mortem

I enjoyed that, that was a fun weekend
Course not everything went to plan, but a number of things did, and after having had a few nights sleep, I can reflect over things with a clearer mind.
So click the link below for more details!

Tha Booty!
Quite a lot of things worked out this time.
The graphics were actually passable for a change! Though the tiles could do with a bit of work as I didn’t do them in any sane manner ( each were done seperately as a unique 64×64 image.. it’s magic that most of them fit together! Well, magic and the power of GIMP’s rotate tool 😉 )

The idea was fairly simple as well: capture all the forts!
The process being a bit more involved, but not by much.. you start off near an island with one ship, a full set of crew, and 1000 gold.
Capture forts, use their gold to make more men and ships, and repeat. Occaisionally finding chests for extra booty, or risking the mines for even more.
Of course, there are five other “beards” in the area doing the same thing, along with the “non-beards” ( the neutral/mutinyed crews. )
Course, it didn’t quite go to plan ( as described below in The Scurvy! ) but, actually, a lot of that is in there, just not fully wired up.

Although there’s not a great deal of game there, it is still somewhat amusing to fiddle with the amount of units the AI gets, and see how quickly they decimate one another!

Tha Scurvy!
Unfortunately, a fair amount went quite wrong.

This will be the last use of my engine in it’s current state.
It’s just too clunky to continue use, as I had to do a fair amount of dodgy hackery for things to work.
It buffered mouse input, for instance.. so that when the game lags, it queues it up and goes mad!
It also has to do a rather obscene amount of redirection to get it from the input system to Lua in the first place.
The keyboard also wasn’t helping much as it wasn’t picking up half the keys, and I had to write custom “debouncers” to deal with key presses. Yuck.

The renderer part isn’t exactly optimised either as it will draw each one of those tiles individually, rather than do them in batches of the same type.

Design wise, I did my usual madness of making the scope perhaps a bit too much. Though I dare say that without the oversleeping and engine bugs, I more than likely would’ve got the game done – minus menus and sound.. it’s not far off it as it stands.

Tha Plank!
There’s still a lot of feedback missing, as pointed out by xeon06 in the current comments. When you move units about, they get queued up in a waypoint system, and there’s no real indication of that actually happening.
Ironically, there is a set of hud icons in the player sprite sheets.. but I didn’t get round to using them.

The map.
Done in a text editor.
By hand.
With a sheet of grid paper with reference codes for all the tiles.
Madness.
I need to build a tile editor 😉

To be honest, continuing it in it’s current form would be quite difficult due to the engine falling apart now.
It’s served me well, but it’s time for a new one!
That said, I still enjoyed making what I did, and it may not be as complete as I wanted, there’s still a fair amount there and you can see the direction I was heading

With any luck, a new engine will prompt me to actually finish these things!

Oh and in reply to Endurion about Trend Micro giving a false positive, it probably is just that.. the Windows build was done on a brand new squeaky clean install of Windows 7 that had just finished installing itself that morning, and has avast! anti-virus running on it and didn’t find anything.. if you’re wanting to be extra safe though, the source is there for you to recompile if you like.. you’ll need CodeBlocks to do it under Windows, and probably need to do some fix up to the .cbp project as I think I’ve removed event.cpp but not updated the project file.

This was my first ever Ludum Dare, and it was even more awesome that I had ever expected.  I had a blast with the Global Game Jam a few months back, and that made me even more tempted to test my abilities amongst the best game makers in the world for Ludum Dare 17.  After 48 hours of intensity, here is my result:

I also did one of them fancy time lapses that you can check out on the youtubes. And check out the actual submission page for the game and play it!  It’s pretty rough right now, but I really want to continue to work on it and refine it into a bigger project afterwards.  So a big thanks to Ludum Dare for giving me a huge creative energy boost!

-Love,
Kyle

For now that’s my High Score on my favorite game so far… This one got me hooked up for hours!

Now i’m preparing a small protection so I can get out of the computer and have dinner…

I wished I could save/pause though =(

Tags: Highscore, Paradise Fort

Finally got Allegro 4.4 compiling on my Linux machine! New download at my entry page.

EDIT: Thanks for your help, Pov!

I tried to update my LD submission to fix a graphical bug. Unfortunately, while the “edit your entry” screen appears fine, pressing “submit” causes the game title, description, and links to vanish. The screenshots, for some reason, survive.

My page is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?uid=1441 if there is anything there to interest you; the game itself is available from http://www.mediafire.com/file/5izfj2ymddr/Jump Pirate_final.exe

The problem is, due to the lack of links it is not recognised as a valid entry. Consequently all my entrant privileges (e.g. voting on other entries) have been suspended. Help!

It’s about that time where I reply to some of the comments

Perrin says …
For a 2 hour game it’s a pretty good effort, could desperately use some in-level checkpoints.

That’s a good suggestion, but I think I prefer it to remain challenging

Neilo says …
Good effort for 2 hours, however it’s pretty damned frustrating!

Yep, I didn’t have much time to sanity check it before I decided to submit – I cut it really bloody close! 😀

Almost says …
My biggest complaint is that multiple hats do not stack like a tower.
Also, distance jumping off the edge of a platform is hard sometimes.

Hahaha! That’s an ace idea.. But I fear it would have gotten unwieldy(or slow :o) so I decided to allow you to wear the hat after you got them all, so you knew when the exit was open if you couldn’t see the exit itself.

Behold, Bouncecrab, Starfish Island!

The game is sadly quite short, but I’m pleased that I managed to get something I could call a “game” at all  This is my first foray into actual game programming, written entirely from scratch using Standard ML and the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL).  Special thanks to Tom 7 for his SDLML bindings.

The Windows version seems to have way-too-fast timings, but I’m told it is sort of playable.  Also, the latest release of the Mac version is statically linked against the GnuMP library, so if you had any problems with it before, please try again.

This past weekend was super fun!  Thanks, Ludum Dare, for existing!

So, it’s been a couple days since the end of the competition, and I don’t have any posts here, so it certainly seems a good a time as any to change that.  I’ll take this time to describe the grand dreams we had working on Eden Island, as well as answer a few things people have written in their comments.  I’d also like to thank everyone for taking the time to review the game and give some good feedback.

First off, what didn’t make it in.  You got to see the pirates, but what you didn’t get to see was the extremely awesome sea monster which destroys the ship.  The art was done, the ship getting destroyed looked perfect–I just didn’t have time to add the sea monster.  Eventually the sea monster will eat your pirates (and probably monkeys, if the pirates haven’t killed them) if there are too many of them.

The concept of the game was not to be plot based at all–it’s not an evolution from sand to trees to monkeys to pirates to sea monkeys–it’s a combination of everything to create a balanced island.  If you have too many monkeys, you are going to attract pirates (clearly for their luxurious fur); if you have too many pirates, you’re going to attract a sea monster; if you have a sea monster, you’re going to have a destroyed island–back to square 1.  While it is a “god game,” you do not have direct control over anything, really; all you can do is influence what is happening.

There is also going to be a lot more interaction between elements in the coming versions.  For instance, you might notice now that if you have multiple waves of pirates, your monkeys will probably stop throwing coconuts at them.  That means they have run out of them, and they can’t get more.  So the monkey will either have to leave the tree, or a pirate will likely chop it down, since the monkey is no longer trying to kill him.

Rain currently grows your trees, and it will continue to do so.  However, the effect you see now is more for storms; in the later releases, you will start off with light rain, and it will work its way into a storm.  Storms will damage your trees, pirates, and other stuff.

Okay, now for some answers to the comments you have all graciously left us.

First and foremost, several people have stated that the competition must be done solo.  Well, if that were the case, why do the rules make no mention of it?  I started off under the full assumption that it was a solo competition, but when Germille offered his fantastic artistic skills, I closely checked the rules to see if I had to do everything myself.  And guess what?  There is no mention of it being a solo competition in the rules. So, I gladly accepted his services–and clearly the game was better off for that.

Another big point is that it’s not really a game.  Well, it’s not a game yet. Unfortunately I am quite the perfectionist, so I spent far too long getting cool effects in the game than I did developing actual gameplay.  At least I have a lot more planned to go in than what you see now.  Fortunately, I did in 36 hours what I haven’t done on some games in several years.  It was truly an experience.  It was my first Ludum Dare, but it will definitely not be my last.

Okay, now for some specific replies:

smn said it was like a zen garden.  I really like this comparison–it is truly meant to be a world you sculpt and of which you must take careful care.

It inspires jplur to learn flixel: quite a big honor, I believe.  I’m glad my game can inspire anyone to do anything–and learning to make a game in flixel is a noble cause and really quite easy.

increpare: at the moment, you can only have 4 or so plants on screen at a time.  This should mean that you always have monkeys on the ground, otherwise when the pirates come it’d be too easy to just kill them all.  Certainly this will change when there is more interaction between pirates and trees, pirates and monkeys, and monkeys and trees.

zez: about the trees’ bounding boxes: yes, they are quite terrible, and I have redone them significantly in my local copy.  I have also fixed the “drop a monkey on a tree and he starts climbing” bug, as well as the “climb up an invisible trunk” bug.  There are probably also a myriad of others I have fixed, and many more I haven’t noticed.  I definitely welcome all bug reports!

refrag: glad you like it!  I’m honored that it’s your favorite so far.  I think you’ll be really knocked out when the sea monster comes after your pirates, too!  Sorry to hear that you dinged me for not doing it solo, but I was very careful to follow the rules.

xeon06: you’re probably dropping them from too high, so they’re dying on impact.  There’ll be a ‘splat’ sound and graphic for that later…

So, I’m glad if you’ve enjoyed playing, and if you didn’t, I’ll be glad to remedy that!  Let me know what I can do to make it better.

Evil Lair Command uses HTML5’s canvas and javascript. In theory that means it runs anywhere. I decided to do some more compatibility testing based on what I have readily available to me:

Obviously some of the playability depends on the hardware you’re on. Leave a comment if you want to play “what can this stupid game run on” too.

And I’m all out of games. Anyone got bubblegum?

So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…

If I didn’t rate your game it was because:

Some stuff I want to say:

Everybody– Please DO indicate on your title screen how to get to the main menu. And if you include a line that says ‘Press the Any-Key to continue’, please make sure the left arrow works.

(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)

I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!

-TF

hey all,

given the 2 comments on my windsurfing sim, I had to add keyboard commands in addition to the gamepad (which is still recommended!). See readme file in the archive.

Now it’s also compatible with the Xbox 360 controller, as well as the previously supported Logitech Dual Action (and probably many other dual joystick controllers. Also the provided lua DLL does not reference the release vc10 anymore – EDIT: the osg DLL still does ! but it’s not too a problem.

– The new file is at  : http://dl.free.fr/qpLMt33Pg (click on “Telecharger ce fichier” i.e. “download this file”)) . Is there a way to edit the compo entry to add this link and the linux version ?

– EDIT: install the VC10 runtime which is included in the archive (vcredist_x86) or get it from Microsoft here.

– go to bin/ and start ld17_arif.exe

I also updated a few lines of code to add water drag force (auto slow), but no change in the game (data, gameplay).

Later I’ll add jump, better left/right sail effect, wake particles, surfer position, balance, falling, and most importantly a better surfing wave !

As before, control the board/sail with the two joysticks, or S, F and the arrows. F6 to restart.

The original entry is at : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1096

-arif

I say “preliminary” because it’s possible I’ll do a larger more in depth one later.

In making this game I made two huge oversights:

• I used a 2d hardbody physics engine to make a platformer
• I had a total of maybe 12 hours of usable time including a mad bughunt from 12-3AM and most of my basecode writing.

Nevertheless, I’m not disappointed with what I got out of it. I’m just about to do some spriting and make the game look less like debug-draw mode.

Things that went right:

• Everything got up and working quickly
  I did tiles properly and fairly efficiently, I got entities running their update(dt) lines within the first hour, a camera was quick to implement, it all ran along nicely.
• I prevented it from looking too terrible without assets
  seriously, the smoke class made the difference.
• I planned it for destructible terrain from the start
  That way there wasn’t any issues with me destroying tiles and the like, and it wasn’t just a thrown-in game mechanic.
• It isn’t too boring to play
  Me and my brother sat down for a good 20 mins or so having turns and laughing at ourselves. It’s pretty hard, made moreso by the whole running-out-of-space-to-play-in-thing and the you’re-weaker-than-all-the-enemies thing, but I feel that there’s quite a bit of gameplay there to be had, even if most of it’s emergent.

Things that went wrong:

• BOX2D.
  the callbacks i was using basically raped my game silly for just about all of its development time. I spent probably 7 of my 12 hours plagued by a recurrent bug that I just couldn’t squash. Turns out it was fixable by doing the good old mark now,  delete once resolved business, but goddamn I managed to set up those callbacks in a way that made that difficult. So, rule 1 for next time: set up a destruction system beforehand, or don’t use real physics when you don’t need them.
• Poor time management.
  The fact that I ended up with 5 hours development time, 7 hours bughunting should tell you something about how improvised the whole thing was.
• No art

Now with 99% less bugs.

All in all, it’s been an awesome learning experience. Grab/rate the game from Here.

I’ll be working more on this in the coming days, I suspect. It’d be nice to get a version with graphics up, at least, to give the game some context.

edit: fixed broken link.

Quickly whipped up tiles and got a better image drawing function than I had.

Got tiles rendering, and quite a few things ironed out in the meantime. Still need a set of debris sprites, I might do smoke but I kind of like the circles.. I need to make the tiles better though, and improve the level generation. Water should come soon as well.

I’m looking forward to this getting some atmosphere 😀 I’m thinking stormy backgrounds and possibly pirates coming in from the sides of the island too (I’ll need to improve the generation automata 12-fold, i think)

Sprites!

Inthusfar, that’s all the spritework. Heavily Cave story/Oryx/Spelunky inspired. Hopefully I can get the grass, flowers and entities drawing tomorrow, though I still need to do debris sprites and a lot of coursework. We’ll see how it pans out.

Apparently there is a bug in my entry for LD17, where only the sky would load, if you encounter this bug, simply reaload the page once and it should work.

There’s a couple comments now about virus scanners tripping up on Yargh! for some reason.
I’ve tested it myself on a number of virus scanners without any issue, so I can only suggest to update your definition files and so on, since as far as I’m aware, it’s a false positive.

That said, the only thing I can allude it being to is that I compressed the main exe with UPX.
I’ve used UPX before for entries without an issue, so it could be the latest version I grabbed does something that makes some virus scanners thing it’s a bit iffy. As such, I’ve just uploaded an uncompressed version of the game. And seeing as I know some virus scanners would block access to the whole zip, never mind just the exe, I’ve re-uploaded the entire data set with it.

The new version is available here: http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/ld17/yargh-uncompressed.zip

It’s the same data, and it’s effectively the same compiled exe ( I did just recompile, just in case ) but if you’re wanting to be super extra safe, the engine sources are in my entry for you to grab and compile yourself.

If there are any more problems with this, please let me know!