Guys and girl(s), when you make a game with keyboard input, please remember that not everybody is using a qwerty keymap. There are others, like azerty (French), qwertz, bépo, dvorak, and another one whose name I forgot.

So for example wasd for movement is pretty terrible and totally unplayable on an azerty keyboard… *Unless* you use scancodes and not ascii codes to bind keys to actions. That is to say, use the position of the key on the keyboard and not the letter that’s printed on it.

How to do that will depend on your framework/engine/OS of choice.

Other solutions:
– use non-moving keys like shift, alt, ctrl, space, the arrows, return, etc. (Some combinations can be problematic, for example DOWN+LEFT+CTRL doesn’t work here.)
– let the player choose his or her key mappings.

I can change my keymap to qwerty before playing your game, and set it back to azerty after, but it’s a pain…

With so many entries this time around, I know that I won’t be able to play every game, and I’ll probably be missing out on some really cool ones. I know that after the voting, I can look through the results to find the best rated ones, but this doesn’t apply to jam entries, and it’d be nice to get exposed to the compo ones while I can still express my opinion through voting.

Some great games have gotten some good press already, but I know there has to be more out there! What are some “hidden gems” that you’ve found? Games that we shouldn’t miss? Games with great stories and moods, technical beauties, or ones that excel in categories that don’t really align with any of the voting categories? Share them here!

Ludum Dare number 17 timelapse is uploaded!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut-CXi8UDYg

No, that’s not a typo. I never got around to editing the video from my LD17 attempt. So I had a little time left this evening and thought I’d get it up today. Go me. This is going to be a two part video becuase I did take a lot of footage. I seriously did try to crop it all under 15 minutes but couldn’t crunch it enough. So, after I upload the second part to this, I’ll upload my LD18 timelapse. Does anyone know what I do with the screenshots Chronolapse takes? Is there a program or utility I can use?

(please note I juu-uust uploaded it so the early views may have quality sufferings)

http://illusionaldesign.net/Post_LD18_BigBoy_bin.rar

Did some work on Big Boy during the week to get it to a more complete and runnable stage. Heres the changes:

– Used a fixed time step to make physics, etc more stable

– Revamped the physics and collisions

– Cats can now be thrown properly

– You can now die and there is a game over state

– Added some extra sounds

– Variations in enemy sprites (purple/pink cats)

I need to do more work on the AI but the game is quite playable now Enjoy

Since a couple of issues with the random number generator conspired to make the game a little harder than it needed to be, I’ve done a post-compo version of the game.  The changes are:

• Altered fungi generation to always leave a gap for the player to get through.
• Altered fungi generation to ensure the full range of fungus types appear within a reasonable timeframe.
• Weighted weapon toadstools to appear mostly on the front of the ship.
• Added menu to the title screen.
• Added easy mode (less ship inertia, less frequent (and not intensifying) spores, less frequent boulders).

And I’ve also uploaded a couple of videos of me playing through the game (spoilers, obv.):

Peaceful playthrough

Destructive playthrough

They’re slightly jittery because I had a hard time finding a screen recorder that actually worked. Fraps, camstudio, and taksi were all far too slow; I wound up using gtk-record-my-desktop on Linux (which I have on a different partition on the same machine, so it’s not a hardware issue).

Well, it is a week now since I started working on Alpha Channel for LD#18, my first such competition. In fact, the first time I tried to make a real-time game in nearly a decade, I think!

I came in with no pre-conceived game-ideas, but was really happy that the theme was one that would give me ideas on how the develop game mechanics. I already wrote a journal of how the steps in development went, but I thought I’d discuss my post-competition thoughts now that I’ve had time to relax and to look at 30 other entries.

Apologies now, in case I go on a bit (I know I will :P)…

How did the competition environment compare with regular development?

One of the biggest problems with my own projects, games or not, is that I am both a perfectionist and a feature-creeper. Not particularly unusual among developers, but it does mean a lot of overly ambitious, though unfinished, projects lying around.

Early version

Working within the competition time constraint was frankly liberating! My ability to throw something together in the most slapdash fashion with a “That’s good enough; I’ll do it properly if I have time at the end” was great. Although I did come back to redo a few things better on the second day, the changes were more to do with directly improving game-play rather than less tangible improvements (like improving the frames per second by 0.1 through excessive attempts at optimisation :P).

The fact that I could get out a moderately playable version so quickly, then iterate towards the final product, was great. Well, that part isn’t so far away from my regular style, but I usually end up getting more involved with re-factoring during the iterations than actually adding new things, which slows apparent progress significantly and is thus demotivating.

Does Alpha Channel have a future?

After my testers and scorers had played my game and seemed to quite enjoy my game, as far as it went, I was seriously considering further development. I was actually surprised how much people liked it, to tell the truth. The thing is, with a bit more variety and polish, I think it would actually make a decent casual browser game. The problem is that Alpha Channel is not a browser game and I don’t have a lot of interest in learning how to re-make it as one.

Death of a pixel

So, I think I failed a little. In trying to make the game and its mechanics simple (though, I hope, elegant), so that I could largely complete it in the time frame, I sort of missed the opportunity to start making a game with depth, even if I barely managed to scratch the surface of its potential in the 48 hours. Only this sort of more involved game, I think, can have potential outside the browser environment.

Where the graphics stylish or lazy?

Final graphics

Weeeell, that is a difficult question! As I mentioned in my journal, I had originally intended to use a pixellated graphical style, but instead grew attached to the place-holder block graphics and developed that style instead, changing the original concept (wizard and monsters) to one that fitted with the style I’d developed (pixel wars). The background score/level indicators, although most people felt they would be distracting before actually playing, just add to the feeling of being inside a computer screen and, since they barely change except in the top right hand corner, weren’t visually disruptive.

I think the basic idea of going for bold colours and blocks worked to a large degree. It also allowed me to give feedback on health (via alpha channel) and energy (via blue channel) quite elegantly. I do think, however, that I could have made more effort with particles and perhaps other special effects, necessary to liven up what was otherwise a rather flat display.

I’m honestly hoping that Lair of Fungal Wonder has inspired me to really put some real visual flair into my next game! I’d be using pastels rather than watercolours, but the idea would be the same.

What would you do differently in the next Ludum Dare?

Although I am not at all sure that Alpha Channel is really worth continued development effort, I like it! I really enjoyed making it and people actually enjoyed playing it, so it definitely was a success in a lot of ways.

I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed making a barely playable game that was complex enough to have a lot of potential, so I’m not sure I would want to try that tack in future competitions. Admittedly, with experience of LD now under my belt, I probably wouldn’t have to aim so low as I did. I’d also want to learn a few of the facets of the libraries I was using that I realised I wanted to use, but knew I didn’t have time to learn or wanted to risk not being able to get working (specifically on-line high scores & hooking up a proper physics engine). I’ve already started committing some improvements to libraries I’ve used (and will use) if only so I’m better prepared and less likely to find bugs when I’m in the next competition!

The biggest thing I’d do differently is to improve the interface. A simple title screen and/or some nice instructions pages would have made a big difference (I had an instructions page, but it was just one big page with tiny writing; should ideally have been a couple of pages with large text and illustrations of how to play). I needn’t have spent much time at the end on something like that to make the game a lot more pleasant to use, considering that game-play wasn’t immediately obvious. However, having made a game-play video and the fact that the game was pretty simple once you got the hang of it, I don’t think I was crippled by lacking decent instructions in this instance.

Your Opinions?

If you’ve got this far through the wall of text, you must have something to say about Alpha Channel!

I made some adjustments in my game and fix some bugs:

->The ant does not stop instantly when it hits the wall, now it bounces off softly.
->Fixed errors in the saving system.
->The bullets of weapons destroy each other.
->The leaves recover life completely.

Download: http://dc152.4shared.com/download/96-7VECM/Anthill_V2.rar?tsid=20100829-005355-26bf694f

Until more guys!

Postentry

So I finish!!!! Yeah, a little late, but I’m done.

I know it couldn’t compete in the jam, but following that ultramotivational posters, I know this must get done.

Cause I cant work the next 24 hours on the jam (monday agenda), I decide to pause my project and restart it the next weekend. So you can play AWARENESS here.

Postmortem

The obvious subject I must talk is my entry delay. Since I didn’t design anything in the first 24 hours, this rans everything away; also I knew early that, surely, I couldn’t enter on the compo either the jam (cause I already had my Monday arranged). The only think I miss about not been applied were having a wide voting and people comments.

The theme was a little bit hard to take from frontside, and my newcomer nervousness hindered me to adopt any design idea. I must admit that this isn’t one of my best game ideas (I doubt the whole thing while coding) but if I want to finish this game, I must convince myself and trust the instinct.

I was distracted a lot, I went to the movies (to see predators), redrawing images 4 times, and spent hours on wikipedia ‘researching’… that adds presure when you don’t have your design ready.

The design results in simple ideas: a short game (less than 5 minutes to play), use simple mechanics appealing on player’s physical dexterity, and allow him to ‘play’ with fake physics. Aestheticaly I wanted that to make the player feels in control of the situation, even if he must react to the attacks; and provide an attractive challenge curve with little rewards. The theme and graphics were inspired by the course of the golden flower images.

Coding and drawing wasn’t a problem (even if they look messy). Besides an awful angle calculation issue, I feel confortable with flixel (it isn’t the 7th wonder, but helps you to work fast). I felt confortable with the tools. The pipeline was very straight when things were clear: idea + calculation + draw (x4) + code + recalculation + code + (doubt) + grapich retouch + audio + code glace; and lot of playtesting.

What do I learn and should do/avoid on next LD’s (and other projects):

– Finish what you start. Even if deadline is over, or the idea isn’t good enough for you damn perfectionist.

– I must practice rapid/random gamedesign.

– Avoid distractions, use them as a weapon to clear your mind and let him think alone.

Questions for you

Did you quit the compo, or didn’t finish on time? Why? Do you agree with my first conclusion? Sounds fair for you?

And did you play my game? What do you think about it?

This LD was very fun and I hope to participate on more of them soon. The Spacenoid source is already cleaned, but I don’t know if it’s permited to update the source on voting time so I’l upload it at the end of the voting phase.

Some things went well it the game, others not so much. What I failed with:

-The game was too buggy.

-Although an interesting concept it didn’t offer much.

-The music was awful.

-The “Fail Ship”, as I like to call, can be a little too distracting and inacurative.

-A mouse control would be better for it.

Oh well, it was fun anyway and I’m making a remake called Spacenoid DX, and it will fix Spacenoid’s issues and add a couple more stuff. No screenshots at the moment but I will show some soon.

Tags: postmortem, spacenoid

My foiled post.

Things that went right:

• Cooking. I didn’t like the theme and had no ideas (and I’m pretty sure I voted for the theme). So I went and cooked dinner and ended up with a really good idea. Well, I thought so.

Things that went wrong:

• I tried to get Slick 2D working a few hours before the compo started. I couldn’t get a simple blank screen up in an applet. So I gave up and switched to Canvas.
• I didn’t have a javascript framework ready ahead of time. I tried to shave some time off by re-implementing some of the code I used in LD17, but creating an engine in javascript just sucked a lot of time away.
• I needed path finding and grabbed a random javascript A* implementation off the web. Other than having issues integrating it, I also ran into performance issues. And in retrospect I’d have ran into licensing issues since there was no explicit license. This past week, I’ve been converting a fast implementation of A* to javascript. The old A* took 2,240 milliseconds to path a very simple blockade. The new A* took 100 milliseconds to path the same blockade. An order of magnitude better, awesome! Except I need less than 16 milliseconds to fit within a frame, so I need to break the algorithm up so I can compute it over several frames. In javascript. No thank you.
• I tried to write a game in javascript. Being weakly typed, I ran into so many bugs that should have been caught at compile time. Typo one variable name and the interpreter just creates an instance of it. Nice. I also ran into problems with firebug. Things like infinite loops causing the debugger to not function. Even if you put a breakpoint in before the infinite loop starts. I switched over to Chrome and had less issues. But I don’t think I’m ever going to write anything this complex in javascript again. Spending hours tracking down things that a compiler could’ve caught in seconds is not my idea of productivity.

What I’ll do in the future:

• Check out and vet my tools ahead of time. I think I’ll try Unity. Or Slick 2D again (with more time spent getting to know it). Or anything that’s strongly typed. =p
• I may continue with my tower defense idea, because I still think it’s a good game. But I’m trashing the code I’ve got so far in favor of something more fun to develop in.

Hello folks. I’ve been tinkering with my entry for a while now, and I’m ready to release a second post-competition version. This is a much more substantial release than the previous, and contains a number of changes which greatly alter the way it plays. The flow between offense and defense still isn’t quite the way I want it to be, so I’ll continue development for at least a few more days. Feedback would be very much appreciated.

Current version: http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/bubble_tag_current

Changes include:

• Defensive walls
• Boulders which supply resources (for repairing walls)
• Bubbles now act as shields
• Bubble size reflects current health- this acts as a HUD-less indicator of health. It also means that the more health we have, the easier we are to hit.
• Part count is now capped- destroy the core of a larger enemy base to upgrade
• Lots of tuning

I would also like to thank HybridMind, who helped test and had some good suggestions.

Since there was such a good response to my LD#18 entry entitled Infiltrator, I’ve been working on-and-off on a post-compo edition. It’s nearly done.

A list of what I have done so far can be found by clicking “read more.” (For now, just a raw dump of my changelog summaries. I’ll put together a more complete list of what’s new once I am done.)

• Implemented running (use SHIFT)
• Implemented sound and oneway flags for triggers
• Added beeping sound effects for timer counter
• Reworked munitions dump level
• Added background tile layer
• Added transparent shadows
• Added smoother level transitions
• Added full level save-state recording (well, most)
• Clarified “neutral” enemies (which are now in same clan as player)
• Mines now leave scorchmarks
• Fixed player HUD being overlapped by game objects
• Redid level triggers so a desc can be given at same time
• Further fleshing out tutorial level (added explanation for continue pads)
• Added resume game function, which uses a Flash cookie to store all level states
• Added ability to save/continue game
• Added new large explosion for mines/rockets
• Soldiers now leave dead bodies (which can be thrown by large explosions)
• Soldier pathfinding fully in place
• Soldiers can now patrol along pre-defined routes
• Holes dynamically added/removed from Astar nodegraph
• Added Pathfind testing level
• Added ability for troops to return to original spawn point via pathfinding
• Implemented Astar pathfinding
• Added continue points in levels
• Redid door/sensor tiles
• HUGE performance increase in enemy rendering: Only re-generating sight-cones when changed
• Levels are now loaded from XML files and no longer hard-coded
• Added must-kill-enemy flag to doors
• Expanded intro level to teach about must-kill-enemy doors and mines
• Slightly improved the tile artwork

I have found a few game sites with my Ludum Dare entry, Money Thief as one of their games. They have published this without my consent, and I’m not sure how to get them to take it down.

A quick Google search for “Money Thief game” shows at least two sites with it featured as one of their games. The only site I’ve actually uploaded it to are Kongregate and my own site.

What do you guys recommend? I’m going to go ahead and site-lock my entry and my version on Kongregate, but how can I get these other guys to take it down?

Well I’m been putting this off for a while but I might as well do it now.

This past LD was quite the challenge for me, especially the theme, I found myself unmotivated by the fact that the theme more or less dictated most of the gameplay, thus more or less disallowing me to go about my usual “wing-it” strategy. I had this idea for a game pop into my head the night before the compo as I was about to fall asleep, and I was really hoping for “Hidden depths” or whatever to win so that I could use it. My mistake was probably getting so excited about that one idea, and as a result, when I got the actual theme I was too disappointed to bother looking further into the theme. I went for a walk and got an idea as to how I would make my game concept work with the theme, and got really excited. The idea was that your character would get parts from enemies and would then craft weapons out of said parts. The idea quickly died as I realized I’d be spending my whole 48/72 hours fighting the inventory system. Once again moping about, I noticed Hamumu had posted some of his ideas for anyone to use, and, desperate as I was I read away.

One of his ideas, which I don’t remember at this time, sparked an idea in my mind: Have turrets shoot circuit boards that power electric gate things! It wasn’t much, but I figured I could cram it into my game concept from the night before. And then I started work on D3SCENT.

It was interesting to make a game that focused on storyline first, game mechanics second, as I almost always do the opposite, “Oh, here’s the engine, time to staple on a couple lines of humorous dialogue”. I quickly realized that for D3SCENT to be a success I’d need to focus on story first, which ended up being true, once I had the story in place I was able to create the ambiance and world it called for, and meant I didn’t have to go back and tweak the whole world to make it fit with the storyline.

I’m very happy with my end result, heck, it got featured on Byetjacker, but I’m tired of fighting with and for gamemaker. I should be getting flash CS5 sometime soon, so I’ll try working with that a bit. Though I’ll probably have to stick with GM for the next LD or two until I’m comfortable with flash.

Some people have been complaining that my entry was too hard. Perhaps it is,but I was playing on it tonight and I managed to get to wave 9 of 10, almost completed it! 😛

The ranking system is definitely all over the place, I will need to take a look at it once the competition is over 😛

Tags: 48 hours, competition, flash, score

I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

Tags: actionscript, as3, avoidal, browser, final, finished, flash, game, postcompo

I’m going to work on a iPad/iPhone version of my Ludum Dare entry and had a friend help with some art brainstorming. Here are a few drafts. What do you think?

Current look: (Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2612 )

New drafts:

Main character: The idea is to drag the monster around by moving the eye.

Updated versions of the two robots already in the game

New robot concepts: Big slow robot that can take a few hits. Slow hovering robot that shoots with smaller robots. Some powerup!

Wrote a blog post making excuses as to why I didn’t finish my Ludum Dare entry here:

http://hobbygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/ludum-dare-18-and-pyweek-11.html

tl;dr version:
“Turns out having a toddler and an infant to take care of is pretty time consuming.”

Why yes, I am shameless enough to blame it on my kids. Mostly only had code, but I did take this picture of our brainstorming session:

Maybe next time. Great job everybody!

I’ve been tinkering with my LD 18 game over the past week and a half. The main things I’ve added are online leaderboards, background graphics and better in game help.

It seemed like the main problems with my game were confusion over how to play, very bare gameplay unrelated to the ‘story’ mentioned in the readme and misunderstandings over the goals. There are now several pages of in game help explaining the mechanics, with pictures, that will hopefully clear up how the vacuum mechanic works. I’ve added some nice tile mapped backgrounds and an intro ‘cutscene’ which should indicate that you have to defend the area beyond the left of the screen. Finally, it’s basically a score based endurance game so the leaderboard should emphasise that part of it.

Astrovax also turned out quite addictive, hopefully the leaderboard will make it more so. >:D

The new version can be found at astrovax.moop.org.uk.

So yeah, I finished a post-compo version of my jam thing. I’m quite happy with it, but beware, it’s really REALLY hard.

BWOOP
download

== CONTROLS == (These are explained in-game, too)
Arrow keys = move
S = jump and confirm
D = pick up and throw
D + Down = put down
D + up = throw upwards
R = restart
Esc = Quit
Note that the speed of thrown objects changes depending on your own momentum while throwing. That is, throwing stuff while walking makes them fly farther.

Heya, just posted my game on GameJolt! 😀
here’s the link:
http://gamejolt.com/open-source/games/arcade/afterdark/3418/

It’s the post-compo edition.

On another note, good luck to everyone with the results!

going to announce date, as well as themes and rules all at once, to make a nice change

• theme: Greatest Fear.
• rule: Collaborate with someone who has never worked on a game before.

you don’t *have* to work with someone else, it’s optional, but encouraged. and collaboration can be of any level, as long as someone (or thing, I won’t discriminate against pets, zoo animals or alien encounters of the game kind) contributes something, be it level design, a doodle on paper you scan and use as a sprite, photos of them for character frames, or writes the dialogue, or voice acts… whatever.

and due to the nature of this rule, these contributions can be made at any time, before, during, or after the weekend of the mini (and I’m super lenient with time anyway, so feel free to take your own 48 hour-ish chunk out of September as you please for putting it all together, the weekend date is mostly so if you want to work alongside others its then).

• the start date: 3am GMT/UTC 25th September.
• end date (not strict): 3am GMT/UTC 27th September.

[ Submit Here | View All Submissions ]

but like I say, its loose so do whatever suits you.

also judging entries; I know some people like to have minis with a round of judging, I wont be having that, and it’s not up for discussion.

also also, it’s my hope that people will explore what their real greatest fear is through the games they make during this mini, but you are welcome to interpret the theme how you like, or disregard it all-together.

any questions about the rules or anything just comment on this post, but as a general rule anything you want to do, I’m cool with

I’m very excited for the Mini-LD. As I said in the announcement thread, I will be working with my stuffed fox, Charles Feynman.

He is partly there for moral support and partly for me to bounce ideas off of. (I have some good ideas when I just sit and chat with him. Having someone/something that just sits and listens to you is great for brainstorming.)

I will be facing a fear of mine this LD: I will be making a side-scroller using pixel graphics. I’m terrified of making pixel graphics as I’m rather bad at it. That’s my task here.

It will likely be pretty simple, but it’ll get the job done.

I’m starting out by doing a warmup game using (As I’m doing in the Mini-LD) GIMP for graphics, sfxr for sound, Flex+FlashPunk for code, and I’ll find something for music.

For those who are curious, my warmup game is a side-scrolling hack ‘n slash about a fighter (One of two playable characters) trying to retrieve a Valuable Treasure from a dungeon, fighting goblins and orcs to get to it.

With that, I’m going to get to work!

Hey Everybody!

A friend of mine is organizing an “art game” exhibit in Toronto called “START”. Here are some details:

START

Sept. 13 – 17
8am – 10pm daily
www.thestartshow.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157656320916123

The goal of the event is to promote “art games” created in Toronto and beyond. The plan is to let visitors play a variety of unique games, and let them decide for themselves what is art. This is the first START, and we’re hoping it evolves into a yearly event. START will be held at the Ontario College of Art & Design which is affiliated with The Art Gallery of Ontario.
http://www.ocad.ca
http://www.ago.net

Everything takes place in one very large room, traditionally used to display paintings. In that room we’ll have 5 PC’s projecting games onto the walls for people to play – one projector is HUGE. The room will be impressive. Visitors can drop by anytime (open daily until 10:00pm) including Thursday (the Gala). We’re expecting hundreds of students daily (school will have just resumed), with 2 “gala” nights that will attract an older audience.

Due to budget and time constraints, we will be showing PC indie games only.

I gave him a list of artsy games off the top of my head (with some help from IRC), but LD is so big now, I realize I could be missing some real gems.

So if you know of any Ludum Dare games that meet the criteria of “art game”, ones you created or adore, please nominate them in the comments (one game per post, and give a nod to nominations you agree with). If you can find a link to the competition page, or a blog post here, that would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

Ludum Dare 18 judging has finally ended, and here are your results.

Top 20 Competition Games

You can check out the top 20 competition games here (including ties):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=top

Winners are decided by the Overall category. To see the complete list, hit the “Show All Entries” link at the bottom.

Categorical Top 5’s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 20 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 18 Jam Games, Compo Games, oh my!

Ludum Dare 18 was our first trial run of the new combined Competition and Jam event. So in addition to the 172 entries created by individuals for competition, there are 41 more games created teams or individuals that decided to take an extra day to polish their game. Be sure to check those out here:

ALL JAM GAMES (41) <--

[ ALL COMPO GAMES (172) | ALL GAMES (213) ]

Overall, the response to the Competition and Jam has been extremely positive. But now that the Ludum Dare 18 has come to a close, we’d like to hear your thoughts.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/did-you-like-the-jam/

* * *

And THAT was Ludum Dare 18

What an incredible event! Thanks everyone for making Ludum Dare 18 such a big deal.

When the smoke cleared, we had a total 213 games across both the Competition and Jam! This is our current “high score”, 10 entries ahead of Ludum Dare 17 in April (203).

During the final theme voting round, we collected nearly 500 votes in a single day! If we’re to take that as the number of participants, that means Ludum Dare 18 had an over 40% completed game rate! Wow!

Theme voting results can be found here.

Press Coverage (Viral Timelapse Videos)

As for other happenings, Ludum Dare made an impressive showing in the gaming press, especially the timelapse video from one Notch. Kotaku, Engadget, Digg; You name it, they covered it. 200,000 Youtube views later…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/25/ludum-dare-18-press-coverage/

In addition, IndieGames.com and Bytejacker are back with a quick look at many games from the competition. Go see if you were one of them.

Ludum Dare 18 Meetups

Even though the Ludum Dare competition is a solo event, that doesn’t mean you have to work alone. Here’s a look at some of the gatherings that took place Ludum Dare 18 weekend.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/17/ludum-dare-jam-live-at-cb2-bistro/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/21/ludumzilla-at-cb2-indies/
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/08/22/new-england-meetup-video/

If I missed any posts, let me know and I’ll update this list.

Other Ludum Dare 18 related links

– Number of competition entries in the final minutes
– Watch the Keynote, hosted by Mike Kasprzak (PoV)
– View the Theme Voting Results
– The “ALL GAMES” wallpaper by ExciteMike

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, deskphoto, timelapse

* * *

Ludum Dare 19 coming December 2010

Our Winter event, Ludum Dare 19 will be in December. Date to be finalized as it gets closer.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll keep you informed. Also, you can follow Ludum Dare on Twitter.

Mini-LD #21 “Greatest Fear” this month!

Can’t get enough Ludum Dare? Later this month, tune in for another MiniLD hosted by SophieH (GirlFlash). Details about the upcoming mini can be found here.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/04/announcing-mini-ludum-dare-21/

Unfamiliar with the Mini-LD? Mini-LD’s are smaller competitions hosted by Ludum Dare veterans. They’re held monthly in the off months between our major competitions. Tune in to the website every month for details on the latest Mini-LD competition. Curious who’s up next? You can check out the host list on the wiki.

Ludum Dare Games at Toronto Exhibit

I was asked by a friend for a list of “art games” from Ludum Dare events (current and past). I gave him a few off the top of my head, but LD is so big now, I could use everyone’s help making a list of Ludum Dare “art games”. For details and to give me your suggestions, see this post.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2010/09/06/ld-art-games-at-exhibit/

Feel free to nominate games you made. 😉

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 18 such an incredible success. We’ll see you again in December!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

While 50th overall is definitely a step up from last LD, 16th for audio (for the first game I’ve ever used sound effects in) and equal 6th for innovation (4.04 average!) are amazing results and it’s definitely a victory by my standards. Thanks to everyone who voted!

This has been a great LD for more than the scores, of course. While I have to say there were a number of games that felt too similar, there were also a good number that stood out, and the standard of presentation as a whole was fantastic. The feedback and support from the community throughout has been incredibly encouraging and uplifting, and while the previous LD was a good learning experience this has blown it away.

Work on an improved AS3/Flixel version of Sonic Boom is well underway and hopefully others are developing their games further too – I look forward to seeing them.

Cool, came in 5th in a compo that I almost abandoned halfway through due to isometric sorting woes

But looking at the scores in general has reminded me just how much the Humor category needs to be nuked from orbit!

Being hit with a load of 1’s and 2’s in this category (which isn’t relevant to a lot of games) isn’t much fun. It’s obviously not just my games that suffer from this – even Notch’s epic Metagun was given a couple of 1’s in this category, and that was a solid 4-5 game. How about just removing the humor category, if a game would have scored high here, that should add to the ‘fun’ score, shouldn’t it? (Maybe even score Fun out of 10, instead of 5?)

Also, there’s been a bit of what I can only describe as ‘troll scoring’ going on – with solid 4+ games being given 1s and 2s across the board by at least one voter (in a lame attempt to vote down the competition?)

I’d almost suggest filtering out the highest and lowest couple of ratings for each game when calculating the final results?

Discuss…

I’ve seen some pretty unfair ratings in my 3 LD career, but this is just ridiculous. At least they had the decency to n/a everything and not 1 everything. If you can’t play the game, don’t rate it, even if you just n/a everything, the Coolness meter is to show who made the biggest contribution via vote, this isn’t contributing to anything. Anyways, [/rant].

I wrote a little script to scrape all the ratings for all games and put them in a comma separated value file.  You can open this in any spreadsheet app (Excel, OpenOffice Calc, etc.).  It’s here, if anyone’s interested:

http://www.spampudding.com/ratings.csv

Tags: ratings, stats

[rant]
If you look at my ratings, every
category has a 1, a 2, 3, 4, and 5 (excluding community, audio). I don’t know if my game is just controversial or what, but it seems silly if the one person who gave me a 5 for graphics (which suck) gave me a 1 in audio (as if it had none, even though it did at the end, and in this case a – would have been just fine). I don’t know the logic behind these ratings, but it’s very silly.
[/rant]

The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.

 
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.

Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.

Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.

Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?

Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

Now, there obviously isn’t a prize and the whole rating thing is pretty meaningless, but this sorta bothers me. None of the comments fit that kind of rating, and if you have some complaint to merit such a rating, I think voicing them in the comments would be the nice thing to do… (I’m more than willing to take negative feedback, but a universally negative rating tells me nothing useful).

Here is a little program I’ve been playing around with (inspired by the theme Evolution, which didn’t make it again):

• Random Art Evolver (Flash)

This program generates random images based on a code (which is shown at the bottom) and mutates them. When you click on one of the images, you’ll see it in full size at the right and all images will start to evolve from that point on. If none of those get any better, you can restart the same code by clicking on the large image.

Once you have found an image you want to use for something, you could capture the screen and save it somewhere as a bitmap, but the idea is to simply save the code and use a function to generate the image at any time.

The library is for haXe, it generates a BitmapData from a given String. It shouldn’t be too hard to port it to as3 as well.

Enjoy!

Tags: artwork, evolution, evolving, flash, graphics, haXe, random, tool

Yep, I’m a-goin’ for it. However, I’m breaking the rules in two important ways:
1) I’m blithely ignoring the theme and doing double zombie rainbows instead (see my comments in the announce thread for why fear really needs more time to do it justice).
2) instead of 48 hours of calendar time, I’m doing 48 hours of compute time.

I am timelapsing this, and there is a clock visible in the display to accurately assess how long it takes. I’ll be pausing the clock when I’m not at my station (due to shopping, being stuck at my day job, etc).

As usual, I’ll be working in Allegro 4.4, and possibly AllegroGL, with GIMP, Milkshape, MilkyTracker and SFXR rounding out the tool suite.

I have some vague bullet hell ideas, and some kawaii/moe chibi zombie girls bouncing about in my head – should be fun!

Tags: cheater, fail, mini-LD #21

Considering i am a man of NO FEAR, i will be making a fishing game

It will contain a morningstar of some description, because morningstars are cool. And a boat!

I’ll think of a proper design when the weekend starts.

I wonder whether the amount of fishing games will be more than the amount of fear-based games? 😀

I, like quite a few people, thought that the Mini-LD was this weekend. (It’s not, though)

However, I already had an idea for a game I wanted to make, and I’m still making that game, still making it this weekend.

What I aim to do is start some time today and finish some time Monday evening. (I will use a similar time frame for my Mini-LD game) I will use AS3, and an SVG rendering library I found.

I was going to use pixel sprites, but I… I just don’t like them. I like making vector images, and they’re much more flexible.

My warmup game uses a play off of a tangent from the Mini-LD theme: I’m taking something that is usually scary and making it cute. (Not cutesy fluffy bunny cute, but still cute)

The game is about a demon girl trying to save a jar of cookies from Evil Robots. (Goodness knows what the robots want with the cookies, they might just be trying to start trouble)

The protagonist (Whose name is Luna) has a powered armor suit which is what allows her to fight robots. The game may feature multiple armors, but I’m not sure whether it will.

I’m hoping that this game turns out well. It’d be really nice to finally have a finished project, too. (Up to me entirely, I know, but still worth saying)

I’ve thrown out everything I had the other night and decided to restart this afternoon.  Here’s the design so far:

Presumably, we’ll have four colours of gem, I haven’t decided yet.  I have decided that there shall be bullet hell bosses, though.

Yes, I’m aware it’s been done before, I don’t care, I <3 shmups :).

Also, if any of you are at SuperHappyDevHouse in Mountain View, California, stop in and say hello! I’m in the Saturn conference room upstairs.

I’m really embarrassed about this. Maybe more than I should be.

I got side-tracked throughout most of Friday evening and the entirety of Saturday. I’ve lost massive amounts of time. I’ve failed. (I’m sorry if this is coming across as really whiny, I’m trying really hard to keep myself under control and I might be doing such a great job)

I may continue with my game, but I’m not sure right now. I’m really, really pissed at myself and am going to wait until I’ve calmed down more to do anything or make any decisions.

Any game I make at this point will come long after Monday, no doubt.

Sorry, guys…

— Mr. Dude

I made a notification about the collaboration in facebook to get someone to develop the game with. I got a reply from a old classmate of mine and we spent a little while chatting about the basic idea and the roles in the development. This is what we’ve got so far:

The basic theme ideas we came up were deep water and leeches. I built up a experimental prototype of the gameplay.

You’re a diver in a sewer dodging leeches but watch for your stamina meter, if it runs out you’ll drown. You can try to detach the leeches from your body by pressing spacebar, otherwise the leeches will drink your health. The graphics are still placeholders but the basic gameplay is functional. Unfortunately im quite busy with packing my bags and leaving the country soon so i don’t know if ill be able to spend more time on the game much but Nina wanted to take the role of game artist. Oh by the way do you have to work the 48 hours straight or can you work on it as chucks in september?`

– Mika

I’ve just started on something that will take some time to complete, and even probably well into the Mini-LD. Therefore, I’m declaring it as my Mini-LD entry.

The game is about as simple as it gets, and is designed primarily to be something that I can actually finish.

It is a platformer about a fox trying to rescue her beloved soft toy from a gang of dogs. (This is a premise I’ve used on countless unfinished things, I may as well recycle it)

I’ve currently got some sprites of the player, and also a bunch of sprites for terrain.

Here’s a picture of the main character, for those interested:

Isn't she cute?

I’m thinking that I’ll call it a day. Tomorrow, I’ll finish up the terrain sprites and hopefully get some code together.

I’m not hoping that I’ll finish it: I will finish it. No excuses, no whining, and no quitting. I won’t keep flaking out, and I won’t keep hating myself for doing so. There’s no excuse for my flakiness, and it won’t continue.

So here’s my first (mini) Ludum Dare submission. It’s a week early, but due to Sophie’s leniency on this month’s rules and the fact that I’m going to be busy the next weekend, I thought I’d best get it done now (plus my wife went to visit a friend so it was the perfect opportunity to do some hardcore coding!)

The collaborator is my wife, and we discussed the theme “Greatest Fear”. She’s a bit of a hippy, so her greatest fear is environmental change, where loggers, evil corporations and cities have taken over the world and there are no more trees and greenery. We talked about a potential game idea, perhaps a 3D globe where you could save the world by strategically preventing loggers from clearing forests, planting trees and building sustainable energy centres. In the end though, we decided that the idea was turning into some sort of dry economic simulation, and although it was probably educational you have to ask yourself the question: Is this game going to be any fun?

I returned to the idea a few days later and looked at it from a new perspective: gameplay. The environmental theme is still there but the game is much more focused now.

The premise is that there are 2 sides, the Hippies and the Loggers, each fighting to own a piece of land. The Hippies want to plant trees and the Loggers want to cut them down and build cities. Each side gets a selection of units to send out into the field: you have Bulldozers, which are very slow but have immense pushing power, Hippy Vans which are fast and agile but not as powerful, and Hippies & Lumberjacks which are the generic ground troops and are cheap to produce. Units that reach the other side wins some land for your side but you will need to defend it from incoming units as well. The result is a fast paced twitchy game with subtle strategy using a tug of war mechanic. You’re constantly sending out your troops to push the other side back and hopefully get some of your units to the other side as well. I drew heavy inspiration from games such as Plants vs Zombies, and an old PC game called Gearheads. For 2 days solid effort I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out.

You can try the prototype here
http://www.phidinh.com/ludumdare/mini21/

I created all the graphics and programming myself using Photoshop and Flex/Flash. Sound effects were created in sfxr and for the soundtrack I used royalty free music from soundtaxi.net. I got my wife to do a bit of voice acting too! As this is my first Ludum Dare I found the whole process to be a great learning experience. I’ve never written such bad quality code in a long time and yet this is also the first time I’ve managed to complete a game programming project. I think when you really let go of professional development values and ignore things like perfect design patterns and just embrace rapid prototyping, it becomes a whole lot easier to deliver something of a unique value.

Aside from the usual polish and cosmetic details, there are a number of improvements I would like to make should I decide to take this game further. More unit types and more interesting unit behaviours would be good (eg. a police car might scare away hippy activists and make them change direction, or a giant ent might crush bulldozers but also be vulnerable to lumberjacks). The various unit variables need additional tweaking to balance out the gameplay (unit speed and pushing power for example). Finally, some kind of intelligent AI as right now all computer actions are completely random (gasp!)

Hope you enjoy, it’s been an exhausting weekend but I will certainly look forward to the next event!

It’s the end of day 1 in my work on Foxen (Well, day 1 probably ended a few hours ago: It’s 2:30 AM here in the Eastern US)

I’ve got a player character who can walk, run, and jump as well as a test level that I made in a proper editor and have written a Python script to munge it (And eventually all of the levels) so that I can embed it in the SWF.

Anyone who’d like to play it can do so here. (It’s a Flash game, so you just need Flash to play it)

Day 2, and I’m ready to get started.

Today I want to have some kind of baddies implemented. I’m probably just going to have one or two types of baddie (Most likely just one), but I’d definitely like to have a variety of them ready.

I’ll release another demo when I’ve got baddies done.

Flixel has displayed some really ugly sound latency that seems to be mostly performance-related. (Meaning that Flixel has too much overhead and sounds lag really badly)

With that being said, I’m planning to learn base AS3. That will mean doing something much simpler than what I’m doing now.

I’m not sure yet just what I’ll be making, but Foxen is shelved for now. I hope to get back to it at some point but for now it’s just not happening.

I’ll still be making something, and I’m going to stick to it being for the Mini-LD. I’m thinking about perhaps doing a shmup.

I’ll post when I have something. Probably when I’ve got a demo of some sort.

— Mr. Dude

This writeup is cross posted on my blog at STRd6.com

Sticking with the competition theme one of my biggest fears is a meaningless life. Not only that, but a meaningless eternity. Pictures for Sad Children has a very similar theme at times and it helped inspire parts of this game (though I couldn’t find a good way to work in “monster most vulnerable when heaving with sobs”). The game is written in JavaScript and uses HTML5 canvas, so you’ll need a modern browser to play it (FF, Chrome, Safari, IE9). Click the image or find it here: Quest for Meaning.

This was my first 2 day competition and I’ve learned some things. First, two days is a long time. Second, having real tools would make me very, very happy. Third, I thought that doing all the art and all the programming for a game would be hard, but it seems to use different parts of the brain, so when working on art the programming part of my brain is relaxing and vice versa.

This was the first moderately legit game that I’ve done all my own art on (title screen and chest graphics contributed by Lana). Also, my first game with a 4 color grayscale pallet. And additionally, my first major undertaking on the Pixie platform.

Working with the Pixie platform had some serious trade-offs. JavaScript is a surprisingly productive language with it’s functional and dynamic nature, but it has a harsh and brutal syntax. The platform libraries helped a lot to smooth some things out, and as they become more complete it will get better and better. Another advantage was the tight art and code integration. It was trivial to create an image and have it appear in the game seconds later. The biggest drawback of Pixie right now is that the code “editor” is pretty much just a text area. There are no tabs, no integrated source navigation, no auto-save, no version control, and all kinds of other terrible issues. Also, there is no real tile editor, though Noel Berry pioneered the way by using the pixel editor as a tile editor before, and the surprising thing is that it’s actually not too bad.

Using Pixie to make art is awesome, but the game “platform” is not fleshed out enough for me to recommend making an entire game in it to everyone yet.

A special thanks to everyone who helped playtest and discuss various elements of the game throughout it’s stages: Boltz, McGrue, DavMo, Lan, MW… props.

So check out the game and let me know what you think. By making heavy use of Pixie, especially in time limited competitions, I hope to really iron out the core usage scenarios and make it amazing.

The future is bright and full of meaning.

I’m in a weird mood today, so I decided to put forth a challenge to members of our #ludumdare IRC channel. Feel free to join us. The challenge is simple:

Make a game — take it to market — sell 1 copy (or license it, or earn $1 in ad rev)

Many of you have done the first part, but let’s go all the way this time. The simplest definition of a professional game developer is someone that has made money developing games. So lets create-us some new “professionals” and get some games out!

Think of this as a race (or a Nanowrimo for games+business). Have something new for sale and in a store by the end of October. And if you can sell a copy (or sign a licensing deal, or earn $1 in ad revenue), you win.

October ends [fergcorp_cdt_single date=”23:59 October 31, 2010″]

NOTE: Start anytime! The clock is ticking! If you’re blogging here, use the “PC #01” Category. I’ll give it a better name later. Come October, the Challenge takes over Ludumdare.com.

Take a compo game and polish it up, something you’re working on now, or start something new. Bottom line, finally make good on that goal to start selling games. Lets do this!

Discuss in the comments, or hit the jump for some store and market suggestions.

* * *

Open Markets

There’s no restriction where or how you should to sell it, but App Stores are pretty popular streamlined ways to sell games today. There’s often some paperwork that needs to be filled out and mailed before you can sell, so I strongly suggest you do that ASAP.

Mobile
– Apple iOS [iPhone, iPod touch, iPad] (Obj C, C/C++, OpenGL ES) – $99 year fee
– Google Android (Java, C/C++, OpenGL ES) – $25 one-time fee
– Palm WebOS (C/C++, SDL and OpenGL ES, or HTML 5) – Free (Paypal payout)

PC
– Intel AppUp [Windows and MeeGo (Linux) Netbooks] – CONTEST – Free (Paypal payout)

Flash and Web
– Flash Game License (Licensors Marketplace) – Free (FGL takes a 10% cut)

Console
– Xbox Live Indie Games – $99 year fee

* * *

Pitch Markets

Some marketplaces require you to pitch and get your game approved before it hits the market. Those are included below.

PC
– Steam
– Big Fish Games

* * *

Events

For completion, a list of general indie game contests with money prizes.

– Independent Games Festival – Due October 18th – $99 Fee
– Indie Game Challenge ($100k top prize) – Due October 1st – $100 Fee

* * *

Payment Services

Perhaps you’d rather sell direct from your website? Here are some tools for that.

– Paypal
– BMT Micro (credit card, cheque, and more)
– Plimus (discussion)
– Amazon
– Google Checkout

If you have anything to add, post them in the comments.

So we were joking back and forth in IRC, pokemon came up, and we thought ‘wouldn’t it be neat to have a game with creatures from the channel.’ So here’s the deal: this here Google Docs form will collect the stats on “your” creature, based on your personal view of yourself along with one or two special attacks. Then, this CSV export (in-browser view) can be dynamically loaded by your game to populate it with monstrous versions of us. This is free to use for anyone to make their game that little bit more dynamic. Don’t worry about being realistic, variance is good (and important). When using the data, you’ll probably want to apply some noise to it and maybe even expand on the creatures procedurally, as there’s not a lot of room for everyone to make something totally unique.

Suggestions for new creature and power types go to [email protected] /* */

I’ve posted a postmortem of Dodger, my Ludum Dare 18 entry on my blog.

But better late than never. It starts a few hours into my development as I was using fraps to capture the start, which failed badly. Without any further ado, I present my timelapse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbIu-Tmsf0

Ok, I am going to do this thing!

I am already breaking the rules at night one though, as I am not really going to be making a game. I have two in progress projects, one of which I am going to try to take over the finish line. The first big one is itch which is a graphical “programming” language for iphone. I dusted it off last night, and discovered that it is in desperate need of a rewrite, so that kinda spells doom for me getting it done. The second project is wireworld + a synthesizer, again for iphone. This project is only just started, so I can do it right the first time (ha, ha, ha)

Anywho, something to do. I am also taking a week long vacation in the middle of october to visit with my girlfriends family, so this may have some impact on the project.

my workspace

Also as an update, a picture of my workspace, and for dinner I ate a bunch of food from the little italy street festival that is happening down the block. Lucky for me this isn’t a weekend challenge.

I think I neglected to mention in my last update that I am totally new to the ludum dare website, so I am somewhat unsure of the blogging etiquette. I am going to err on the side of too many posts, and let the admins unpublish my drivel if need be.

Last night was somehow productive even though it got off to a pretty horrible start. I spent the bulk of my time trying to come up with a way to use core data to save my progress, but then discovered that the api just has far too much overhead for my liking. After that, I got some progress on the UIScrollView control that I am using for my main editing area, but then decided that I didn’t like using UIKit at all and was going back to my standard openframeworks hacked together ui framework.

I burned another hour trying to get the software running in openframeworks, unfortunately it is pretty unstable in the github right now, and I was somewhat running out of energy. Eventually I got it though. The main bulk of my progress happened then, I got a scrollview that you can pan around, and started working on zoom features. My scrollview is not as nice as the apple one, but I think it will work alright.

I totally ran out of energy for coding, but I didn’t really want to go to bed, so I spent another hour pixeling interface details to use later. I imagine that is the approach I am going to take, pixeling as a break for my mind from coding.

I tried to go to sleep, but I must have had too much caffeine, because I couldn’t make it to bed until 1:30 am. Ah well, I think I can still hit my goal of getting the core of the app done this weekend, possibly without great graphics. That will give me a few weeks of tweaking to get it ready for the store.

I didn’t really fully explain the app yesterday, so I can do that right now as well. The core of the app is a cellular automata called wireworld, which is a bunch like conway’s life, but it is a bunch easier to create turing machines in it. In fact, people have created some really neat ones that solve primes and etc. There are two things that I am going to pack on top of my wireworld implementation. The first is that the automata will run at a user defined rate, say 120 step per minute X a clock multiplier. The second is that each cell in the system can be linked to the trigger of a synthesizer. I have a sample based synthesizer that is ready to go, and I started writing a clone of the dx7 that I might be able to jam in if I have time. There are some other features, but I think they will need to be excised for this weekend.

wireworld + dx7

Check the submission page here

I have a huge fear of heights. As mundane as that is, it carries over into my gaming- if I run a character too close to an edge, especially in 3D, my stomach drops. My goal was to recreate that feeling for everybody else, as best as I could.

I got my inspiration from a BBC Planet Earth episode, where I saw a mountain goat living its normal life on the sheer cliff of a mountain, and I thought about how frightening that would be for me.

I actually made the game last weekend, but I took some time to have a friend who had shown some interest at my last LD to write some music for me.

This was my second flixel game, so I was able to progress faster and spend more time on more interesting stuff, like gameplay and art.

Enjoy!

It’s a little late into the Mini-LD proper, but I’ve decided to post this.

After narrowing things down a bit, I’ve decided on a concept for my Mini-LD game.

I’m going to make an arena shooter structured a bit like Geometry Wars. It will use a similar abstract vector style (Though things will look fairly different).

Instead of leveling up and improving skills continuously, the player will play through a series of levels and buy weapons between them. Each weapon will be upgradeable, and the player will be able to equip a limited number of them at any given time. There will also be miscellaneous pieces of equipment that the player will be able to use.

Levels will be procedurally generated, and baddies will come in waves. Each wave will be generated with a different kind of arrangement, such as a wave with alternating types of baddies along the edges, or a ring of one kind of baddie in the center.

There will also be a boss at the end of each level. The boss will be chosen from a give set and given a handful of randomly-chosen weapons.

I will be writing in haXe and using Sam HaXe to process SVG images. I will make my graphics in Inkscape, my sounds in sfxr, and music in LMMS.

As I’ve said/bragged before, the time limit is out the window. Absolutely out the window.

First first. As in my first at least.

Just googled, and found out that the greek word for “Fear of dogs” was Cynophobia, so that’s what I’m calling my FIRST game.
First completed game at least.. (I hope)

The story so far: I didn’t think I was going to participate in this thing yet because
1. I had other plans today
2. I hadn’t got any idea what kind of game I would make and
3. I’ve never made a game before, and have just started learning java in school.
But then
1. plans got cancelled
2. I thought I could make a game about my fear of dogs, and 3 is hardly an argument at all, right?

So I started my little project earlier this evening in game maker by creating a little red circle known as obj_player and made him walk around in a room filled with instances of obj_wall. Next, I made a dog (a circle in different colours with a tail) and named him obj_dog. If I ever get a real dog, I will definitely call him obj_dog.

So, I have a player and a dog (or dogs if I place more than one), what now? I found out that to add a little to the phobia-feel, I could make the dog(s) turn around to always look at the player. This prooved more difficult than I thought, and I sat maybe an hour calculating the players position relative to the dogs and some advanced sinus-to-degree-formulas that ended with the dogs never facing the right way and a divide-by-zero-error when the player and dog had same x-position. I was almost about to give up, but then I asked a good friend of mine who thaught me that I could just use a code called point_direction with the x and y values for each object and get the job done in two lines. So that’s where I am now, I can move around while a bunch of dogs are watching me as I go.
For Collaboration I might ask my roommate to make some music, or I’ll ask a dog to be my voice actor Or maybe vice versa..

I’m not sure where to go from here, but I think it will end up as either a puzzle game where you can’t go too near the dogs, or a “notgame” like the ones Jordan Magnuson are making, where I rant a bit about how scary and bad dogs are. Anyways, I’m learning lots of new stuff about the Game Maker Language! Screenshot-time (I may change some of the sprites later):

Uh oh…

Sit?

Tags: MiniLD #21

In this game, lil’ boy need to avoid getting GROUNDED and escape the supermarket where he’s injustly blamed for some mischief, avoiding the guardians in a MetalGear (’87) – style sneaky way.

14h spent so far, mainly on programming. I’m using Pygame (programming), Gimp (graphics), SFRX, Audacity (sfx), ZynAddSubFX (virtual keyboard).  The OS is GNU/Linux.

Trying to get with something playable for the miniLD over the standard 48h week-end delay – but I couldn’t turn down an invitation on saturday night 😉

So far I have a basic scale2x top-view with scrolling (fixed-rated logic&render), tiled background, moving sprites, turbo-mode (FPS*3), the very beginning of a built-in background editor, and code is still maintainable 😉 Also there’s a psychedelic “drunk-mode” effect (drink to build-up courage, but lose your balance!).

I had spent a few days on learning Blender recently but for now I’ll still have to make do with my limited Gimp skills.

Oh, and I have some recorded screams for lil’ brothers from years ago. That breaks the “no prior art” rule but that complies with the “collaborate with a n00b” one 😛

For those of you who are unaware, the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon ran yesterday through today. Ted Hahn and I put together an Android app called “D8Coach” which suggests pick-up lines to young men trying to approach young women at bars. The user, or “player,” since we like to speak in terms of game play mechanics, keeps track of which lines have worked on which women. Over time, d8coach will be able to generate great icebreakers to make approaching any woman a synch. Fast forward to 48:48 for my D8Coach pitch. Award ceremony: our prize is delivered just after 3:00. TechCrunch Coverage

Thanks, Ted. Couldn’t have done it without you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Today started with me trying to install Sam HaXe (An asset packaging tool for Flash / haXe). After some fudging some things, I got it working, and it works great.

Then, later on, I played this game. It inspired me.

I’ve decided to change my concept somewhat and make an arena shooter with robots fighting.

The player will have a choice between a handful of robots, each of which they can upgrade in a handful of attributes. (Speed, rate of fire, etc.) There will also be a number of levels, each with different terrain. The player must fight their way through 10-25 waves of baddies (Haven’t decided on the actual number) and a boss in each level.

The game will be fairly fast-paced, but the difficulty settings will affect the speed that things move with. I will favor using more powerful baddies over massive hordes of them, as masses of “popcorn” baddies aren’t much fun after a while, I think.

At the moment, I’ve got sprites for three different players (The look of the game will be very simple) and a flash applet that displays a player character that rotates to point at the mouse. I’ve got haXe working, Sam HaXe packages my images correctly, and things are looking good!

Tomorrow, I’ll try to get some kind of player movement in.

– Mr. Dude

Admittedly it was so I could vote but also because I really felt I had to submit SOMETHING, so here’s one of those good ol’ “GreaseMonkey miraculously pulls something out of his arse” competition entries, featuring two tunes made in a minute each and two made in 30 seconds each (self-imposed limits). This may have had something to do with the fact that Vieko wanted some music for his entry. (I spent about an hour on that, which in tracked music terms is quite a lot.)

In this game, your greatest fear is missing a compo.

On a casual side note, there are zombies.

And yes, the music is listenable, albeit a bit simplistic, although if you love guitar chugging then the sound track will be perfect for you.

Check it out, it’s called “Missing a Compo” and for the screenshot I accidentally took a shot of nearly my whole primary screen.

What started as a friendly challenge to our community has exploded in to an internet wide invitation to indie developers everywhere.

Unlike a traditional Ludum Dare event, you can disregard the rules. The focus this October is to get a new game for sale somewhere. That can be something you’re already working on, something new, or something you want to finish.

To learn more about how this started, see the original post.

The rest of this post is a short guide on what you should be doing to make the most of your time.

Step 1. Pick a platform, do your paperwork

If you haven’t already, you should decide on a platform, and sign up for a developer program. To complete your registration, this will usually include filling out paperwork (such as a W-8BEN if outside the US or W-9BEN if inside) or signing contracts and mailing them. Mailing and getting papers approved can be a little slow, so do this ASAP.

I don’t have a good reference for filling out these forms, but will note the W-8BEN is only 1 page, and Apple’s iOS developer program had an excellent guide for the paperwork. I’ve been filling out these forms and sending them to nearly every distributor, all practically the same as the initial Apple ones (one platform required you to omit a section, but I forget which).

If like me you’re outside the US, you’ll likely need an EIN. You can fill out a form (to reference), and call the IRS (during normal business hours) and have one assigned to you within minutes.

Getting paid usually requires either a bank account (direct deposit) or a Paypal account. If you don’t have either, you should set one up. Bank choice wise, you should open an account at an institution with a SWIFT code. In the US that’s Bank of America, in Canada that’s CIBC (there may be more, but those are what people usually suggest).

Signing a contract is usually a matter of filling in your name at the beginning (unless automated or provided to you), and signing+dating a signature section of the last page. Using a blue ink pen is preferred, since it’s clearly not a photocopy (versus a black pen). Initialing each page of a contract is also a good idea.

Contractual agreements often require 2 copies of a contract. You sign both, and send them to the other party. They in turn sign both, keep one, and send you one back. That way, both of you have signed copies of the contract.

Step 2. Make your game!

Time is short, get to work!

We don’t have any content or marketplace restrictions, but keep in mind the goal here is to sell at least 1 copy (or make money from the game in some other way).

If you’ve never finished a game before, there is an excellent article by Derek Yu here. More resources can be found at the bottom of this post.

TIP: If you have trouble staying focused, keep some paper handy and take notes

Step 2b. Blog about it

Either here or on your own site. During a Ludum Dare Event, the ludumdare.com/compo site acts as a progress feed. To see what others are up to, you merely have to visit the site and watch. This is one of the most interesting parts of the event that most people miss out on; The real live production of hundreds of games all in one place. When the weekend ends, you’ve missed it.

For the October Challenge, we’re inviting everyone participating to share their progress here on the /compo blog. Simply sign up, make a post, and hit publish. Feel free to upload images to the blog using the “picture frame” icon above the text box. Once you upload an image, if you didn’t use it right away (or use the wrong formatting), it can be found in the gallery tab (picture frame icon again).

If you’d like to re-post your blog-posts from your own blog that’s fine, but please watch your formatting! Large images on the blog are 550 pixels wide, and you will break the layout with a wider image than that. If you upload your images here, be sure to select the “Large” size. Also, the paragraph tag gives unusual spacing results, so that’s not recommended.

Step 3. Submit it!

Draft up your description text, prepare some screenshots, then go submit it.

Though it isn’t required, I strongly suggest you make a gameplay video or trailer and get it on Youtube. We’re expecting a lot of games, and don’t expect everyone to buy/play everyone elses games, so a quick video would be a great way for us to admire and appreciate your work.

Step 4. Submit it here too!

Once you’ve sent it off, submit it to us.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2010/

We’re using our standard Ludum Dare submission system to create a master list of all our October participants. To be included, simply create an account and visit that page. The link fields can be edited, so update them to something appropriate. Suggestions include: Website Link, iTunes Link, Youtube Video Link, Postmortem Link, etc. Also, the first screenshot will be used to show your game on the list, so an attractive screenshot is recommended. For an example of what the final list will look like, look here.

We ask that you wait until after you’ve submitted your game to whatever service/marketplace your game is for before you submit here.

Be sure to let us know how long you worked on it; Whether this is new for the October Challenge, or has been in development for months now.

Each account is only capable of creating 1 game. If you’re making multiple games this month, we’d prefer you share your most interesting one with us.

Step 5. Sell a copy/License it/Make some revenue

Getting approvals or licensed takes time, so we’re not requiring you to have made a sale by the 31st. If you can get your game out and your first copy sold before then, then that is awesome!

The goal of the challenge is to get more people to release something and be fully capable of earning money from it.

Prizes

Like Ludum Dare, there are no prizes. “The prize is your product” as we always say.

Or if you think about it another way, if you happen to make the “sell 1 copy” quota, that’s a pretty cool prize too. Breaking the “0 sales” barrier is a big step forward for a game. From that point on, you now have a product to experiment with; To learn the ropes of running a small business, marketing, promotion, etc. The whole “give them a fish or teach them how to fish” axiom, but we’re not so much “teaching” as “telling” you to fish. 😉

Your website is ugly and difficult to use

Thanks!

We make games, not pretty websites. And this October, we’ll be busy making games. If you’d like to bug us to make it look better, please wait until after we finish. Thanks!

Light Reading and Resources

• Derek Yu on Finishing a game
• Andy Moore on Steambirds Licensing (Flash)
• Pixel Prospector’s
  • Big List of Indie Marketing and Business Tips
  • Big List of PC Game Sites from around the world
  • Big List of Indie Game Sites
  • Big List of Game Development Resources
  • Free File Hosting
  • Recording and Editing Gameplay Videos
• MANY game market resources at IndieVision.org

I think a picture says more than 1000 words (which would be 128 bytes), and a movie even more, so I just made a quick one. Sorry for bad accent.

Whop It – pre-alpha

I have a tendency to quit and restart alot.  Okay maybe not.  I haven’t ever really quit anything except for star-catcher, which might could say is just shelved for the time-being.  I’ve already officially started PoV’s challenge, and officially quit, and officially restarted again.  So I make a sub-challenge — Guess how many times I quit and restart.  The one closest to how many times I quit and restart will get a credit in all 3 games I am working on (a 4th project is a port and so I can’t really put you in those credits).  My current PoV Challenge game, my flash shoot’em up, and Hypno-Joe — provided any of these gets finished.  A quick qualifier — This first time I quit and restart didn’t count.  So a zero count means you don’t think I will quit and restart again.  1 means you think I will do it just once from now, and so on.

Here’s a bit of chat that started it:

<Uhfgood> I think I can honestly say that I can get this game, I was working with sgstair on, done in amonth
<Uhfgood> so you know… I might actually re-enter the challenge, provided I can rebuild this prototype in flashpunk in a short period of time
<Uhfgood> I wasn’t going to but because this actually looks doable 😉
<Uhfgood> mrfun – I may have to end my reign of slacktitude
<mrfun> uhf, is it ok if we make a sub-contest guessing how many times you’ll quit and restart the contest?
<Uhfgood> mrfun – Yeah
<Six> mrfun: I call 6

Good luck, good luck to us all!

GERRRRR i hate school!
im sorry but i probly wont be able to be in ludum dares for a while becaue of a over load of home work and stuff like that.

so dont wory (i dont know why you would though)

Tags: school = fail m0nstr

Well, I guess I’m in. This is a great idea for a challenge, and a little spare cash would be nice for a strapped-for-cash student like myself. Even if I lose money, the experience alone will be worth it.

I’ve purchased a developer membership on the Android market and I’ve got a Google Checkout merchant account in the works (still need to wait for that verification deposit to show up). Right now, I’m getting the eclipse ADT plugin setup and getting a Hello World program going. My first impressions are pretty positive.

As far as the game goes, it’s going to involve bubblewrap, and it’s going to be awesome. I don’t want to give too much a way, but let’s just say that the focus on bubblewrap is a bit tongue-in-cheek and the actual gameplay should be pretty enjoyable.

As far as my skillset goes, neither games or Java are my strong points. Ouch! I’ve used Java in school, but never in my personal time. I have spent a lot of personal time in game development, both in SDL and SDL/OpenGL, but I never really accomplished a big project (my biggest being a Pong clone with decent artwork and a somewhat decent AI). So October is going to be a challenge, but these are all things I’ve really wanted an excuse to learn so I’m looking forward to the rest of this month.

Stay tuned! And good luck everyone!

Afterthought of 9/30: Damn, I need a decent host if I want an online high score system.

Edit: Got one of those silly twitter things going: http://twitter.com/martinw89

So today’s officially the last day of September, which means it’s time to throw in my lot with the October Challenge folks. What were you thinking, PoV? Challenging the Ludum Dare to make a game? In a month? One game?

I think we can handle this.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been hacking away on a medium-sized iPad game; I hadn’t planned on finishing it by October 31st, but (with your collective permission) I’m upping my deadline and making it my October Challenge entry. So, without further ado, I present, for the iPad-owning, grand-strategy-loving among you: Distant Star

You did play Master of Orion, didn't you?

Distant Star is an old-school 4x game (a la Master of Orion or Sword of the Stars) for the iPad. It’s a turn-based strategy game in which you explore the galaxy, assembling massive fleets to conquer your opponents and terraform their planets. Starting from a single system, you build starships, research new technologies, and colonize distant star systems — but you’re not alone in the galaxy. There are other races out there, with radically different needs, abilities, and psychologies.

</pitch>

Look! It works in vertical, too!

Thanks to the couple of weekends and odd evening I’ve put in so far, the core of the game is more-or-less complete. You can build ships, assemble them into fleets, and move those fleets between systems. Obviously, there’s a lot of critical stuff left to write: the AI system is just a shell, the research/tech tree aspect is completely non-existent, and the whole thing is entirely devoid of graphical shininess. I’ve also made my life significantly more difficult by attempting to support multiple orientations, but with some slight glTranslate/glRotate cleverness, this shouldn’t be too hard.

I have to confess: I’m not really making Distant Star for the October Challenge. I’m making Distant Star because I happen to have an iPad and I want to play an old-school 4x game on it. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn’t seem to exist, so I suppose I’ll just have to write it myself. Worse things have happened.

Anyway: Distant Star, coming for the iPad in early November! I’ll be writing more about it as things progress, over at Expat Games

Tags: screenshot

I have the game physics working now. You can grab a Windows version at:
WhopIt!

Please read the README.txt, because the PC input differs from the iPhone one.

I finally managed to get the corners auto-rounded to avoid very steep angles.

Just wanted to share my late Mini LD 21 game with everyone:

Klaustrum is a game about the fear of having no escape and being closed in. GreaseMonkey was kind enough to whipped the music in less than an hour and DirkRugged helped with the levels.

We are planning to flesh out lot more levels, tweak the gameplay, etc. and use it as our entry for PoV’s October Challenge. Please have a run at it and let us know what you think: http://legrudgerugged.com/klaustrum/

Originally posted on http://www.36peas.com/blog

The guys over at http://www.ludumdare.com have started a competition for this month.

In very basic terms it boils down to:

You’ve got a month to build a game and try to sell at least 1 copy.

If you wish to get slightly more of an insight into the competition than I’ve explained – See here

This was particularly appealing due to a prototype Gareth put together some time ago but never had a place to really apply it – But an immense desire to get it used for something. This prototype was for a game called Retro Racer.

At the minute this is a fairly crude but fun little game with a couple of tracks, some basic dynamics and a simple control system thrown in. A screenshot has been thrown in for your enjoyment 😉

The basic concept we’ve arrived at for it is to have some sort of non-traditional racer, possibly some sort of gate runner idea.

Anyway, that’s where we’re up to at the minute – we’ll be putting extra posts up as we develop ideas for this project some more.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Alright, I’m in for the October challenge. I’m going to try and finish up a game I started for miniLD back in February. I’ve been messing with it here and there but haven’t really sat down and crunched on it because of other projects like The Brainstormer App and Still Pond for iPhone.

Fittingly for the start of the month, I just to First Playable just today. So technically I have a month to polish and add features. It’s already strangely addicting, to me at least, so I take that as a good sign. I’ve got a lot of crazy stuff planned graphically and bells-and-whistles wise, and want do add stuff like GameCenter, but we’ll see how it goes.

My other goal for October is to try and get my blog going. I’ve got it sort of set up now but there’s some little annoyances that have kept me from posting. So I aim to fix those and post a lot of info about iPhone dev and opengl and stuff like that.

So where would you move next?

In making Blaster Box, I discovered that it is true that all Flash made on Linux has sound latency.

I’ve decided instead to go with an old game idea of mine: Making an Alien Breed tribute.

I will be modding Sauerbraten to make my game.

In it, you will play as a Space Marine fighting their way to a communications room to signal for help. There will be multiple weapons that you can buy at terminals, terminals to buy weapons and supplies from, and lots of aliens to kill.

Though for today (As I slept in ’till noon and have pretty much just played games all day) I’m going to simply write a bit in the design document and maybe play games some more.

A bit of a rationale after the break.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been avoiding FPS’s. I’ve had this weird hubris that I was “above” FPS games.

I’ve come to realize that shmups just just aren’t my thing, roguelikes don’t quite do it for me, and fighting games are right out.

I recently picked AssaultCube back up, and boy does it feel good. Something about it… Well… I can’t quite figure out how to describe it, but it’s nice.

(Neat thing: They added a gun to the game since I last played, and it’s a neat gun)

It makes me happy. I guess it shouldn’t be this emotional for me, and I’m still going to play other types of game, but I’m realizing that I really do enjoy FPS’s.

I’m looking forward to working with Sauerbraten and making this game. I hope I can stick with this one, I really do.

Peace,

— Mr.Dude

Well I’ve decided to make my own engine/framework, choosing DirectX for visuals and DirectSound for audio.  I understand this limits the current implementation of the framework to Windows only.  I take this path because of future plans in 2011 with this framework.  Beside, if I do find the need to port my “OctNovDec” project to other platforms, the framework does encapsulate all details; FileIO, Input, Audio, Visual, and  Timing.

So after getting my framework up and running on an extremely basic level, with a lot of fun whoop-de-doos, I have a splash screen.  Something I said I could do in “10 minutes” ended up taking “40 minutes” because I also made a simple sprite class.  My time estimations seem to lack truth…  Here is the splash screen, at least in concept.

A bit simple, but my best piece of art.

With that I do need to change my logo.  “Presents” must be removed or replaced;  I’ve thought of Studios, but it is just me.  I’ve thought of Games but that could be limiting – even if it is what I am focused on at these times.  I could leave it just BlackBird, but I’m not sure.  In any case, when I have a Main Menu, this will fade nicely into it.  So, this is what I achieved as of last night, October 1st.

Today I’ve got some simple sprite based font system working, a finite-state machine for different Game States, and now progressing to work on the editor.  May come back to edit.  Yay for my first actual post!

This is my first game and my first entry for a LD contest. Annoyingly I was ill last weekend but since the contest is still open I thought I’d sneak this in now

Given the time restraints, I decided to focus on a very simple idea reasoning that I’d rather complete something small than fail to complete a more ambitious project. This turned out to be a good plan since the first version of the game was no fun at all and I was able to change it into something that I hope others might enjoy.

The code is written in python and uses pygame. It was developed on Ubuntu and has been tested on Windows XP. It lacks finesse, the graphics suck (!) and it has a number of rough edges not least the lack of Quit/Restart controls (just press escape to abort). Nonetheless I’ve had fun playing it and I hope others do too. (NB the zip file contains a credits file listing the sources of the sound effects.)

I suspect that part of the fun of playing it will be in deducing the best strategy so beware of potential spoilers in what follows. If you’re thinking of playing it please try it now then come back and read on when you’re ready.

One of my fears is that of losing my memory as I grow older.

I decided to write a simple game/puzzle that would evoke the frustration of memory loss.

I knocked together a very quick first version using some code built on top of the open sourced Memory Starter by John Eriksson.

The first version was based on a nasty trick: it would swap neighbouring tiles after a fixed lapse of time, forcing the player to make mistakes and think that they had failed to recall the exact position of the tile. This, it turned out, was no fun at all. (Not really a surprise in retrospect.)

Part of the problem was that even without the evil trickery behind the scenes, it was too hard to recall such a huge number of tiles but reducing the number of the tiles made it too obvious that the game was cheating you.

In the next iteration, I decided to split the grid into levels, each slightly larger and therefore harder than the other, starting with an inner ring that was easy to complete so the player got sucked into the game.

This played better but I no longer liked the trick of moving tiles and there was no real relationship between the levels. I didn’t like the fact that you could just forget about the ones you had already completed.

Therefore I decided to get rid of the trickery but instead to punish players when they failed to match a tile when they’d already seen its partner by removing already completed pairs from inner levels.

Obviously if it just removed one pair, then it would be trivial for the player to click the backs of the two turned cards and continue on so I decided to remove x pairs where x was the number of times the player had seen the matching card. This makes the game progressively harder the longer you play, with mistakes building on mistakes.

Play testing this proved a far more satisfying game and introduced the idea that the game itself had a memory of your past mistakes, meaning that it becomes progressively harder to complete if you get off to a bad start.

This could be said to be another fear: that we never get over our wrong beginnings in life.

I find it challenging to complete in less than 200 card clicks.  Perhaps my memory is already beginning to go…

Tags: MiniLD#21

#1 at the prototyping phase for the october challenge, not much yet

Originally posted on http://www.over00.com/?p=910

I’m in for this October’s challenge of making a game and selling 1 copy (or making $1 out of it) before October 31st. Well in fact I’m in twice so that means the objective is bigger… $2…

Project #1 – Crazy Scientist Defense

This project is solo. I decided to stay around the theme of my MMO Golemizer as it’s a nice way to promote this indie MMO and after 2 years of existence there’s plenty of spin-off to make out of it.

This is a Flash game (using Flixel) that I started to work on a bit before the challenge was announced. The challenge is basically for me a way to put a deadline on the project which I consider a good thing. It’s far too easy to waste time so by announcing I’m participating to this challenge it puts some pressure on me to get something good that can make money soon.

I’m still relatively new to Flash but so far it’s an interesting experience. My experience with JavaScript made the transition to AS3 easy and there’s plenty of resources on the web so I never really hit some walls making me waste too much time.

Much of the code I’m using is based on my first “real” Flash game which is currently available for sponsorship on flashgamelicense.com. The games don’t have much in common but it’s always nice to have some code you can reuse. I try to keep most of my code as clean as possible so I can copy/paste a lot of it in new projects. That’s easier to say than to do but I try.

So this is an action game mixed with a feel of tower defense. Players are controlling a blimp that must protect Dr. Altus (a friendly but slightly crazy scientist) from monsters trying to invade his lab. While there are turrets the player can buy to help protect the lab I want the focus to be on the blimp action. Having turrets to help just add some strategy to the game instead of being just a big mess of monsters running around with the player not knowing which one he should kill first.

The basic mechanics were built in about a day. The game is fairly simple and it was intended this way. I wanted to make sure most of my time would be put on polishing and tweaking. Besides I also had to do some graphic work so the faster I could get to that the better. There was a quick try to get an artist involved but it didn’t work so I decided I’d deal with this stuff myself… (ouch…).

I’m quite proud of the result actually. Surely an artist could have done better but that’s still good I think.

Do I think I’ll make $1 with this game? Well I surely hope I do more than that. In fact my objective is at least $100 for this one. I already built a small game that made $3 in 2 weeks which some of you might recognize as the Shootorial from Kongregate. It was just a simple experiment for me but when I realized that a simple skinned version of a tutorial could make $3 I thought I could do much better with a “real” game. $100 is still not a lot but until I receive a check of $100 for a Flash game I built that shall be my current objective.

Project #2 – The Fae’s Wyrd

This one is a team project. You can read about our small team here (yay! also artists in there!). While we have completed 2 projects this one should be our first public release. And yes it’s an RPG. Of course what can be built in 1 month is limited so that will be a small simplified RPG. I guess you could say we’re building a roguelike but I’ll let the designer talk about that. If things look good we can probably think of expanding the concept a bit for a new version.

The twist for this game is the elemental advancement concept developed by Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green. So while we might not have enough time to build a full and complex RPG it will have something that makes it different from other RPGs.

My work for this project will be to take care of the programming surrounding gameplay rules. We’re talking about maps, movement, interface and that kind of stuff. Brian knows his design better than me so it will be faster if he takes care of it by himself while I make sure he doesn’t have to worry about other things. Again for this project we’re using Flash and Flixel. Note that using Flixel is simply a matter of using what I currently know. I’m sure the alternatives are also nice but to make it before the end of October it’s not the time to start learning something new.

So far I have taken out-of-the-way the map generation and character’s movement. That wasn’t much to do and it took about 2 days. The map generation is what took most of the time and the result is interesting. I based my work on this article from Adam Saltsman. Since the only directive I received for that was to have a way to create random maps I made sure that some parameters could be set to create different results based on what we might need later.

Here are some results of this code. Note that I used very small tiles for these pictures just to get a full view of the maps:

Again we are not aiming for something ultra-complex here but just something to showcase smart design and release our first public game. For motivation purpose I think that having some work you can show is important. Besides we have more projects in our mind so getting some attention can’t hurt.

Money?

Both of these games will be submitted to flashgamelicense.com meaning that it’s possible we don’t make $1 before the end of October because of the bidding system. There’s no way to predict when the bidding will end assuming bids are made at all. Also submitting a game there doesn’t mean you’ll receive bids the day after even if you end up making money with the game (2-3 weeks later or more). We could slap ads on them and then post the games without any sponsorship just to be sure we make $1 (my experiment with skinned tutorial proved me it’s quite easy) but then it would just be wasting possible opportunities. My solo project is nearly completed so it might make it but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t. I think our main goal is to RELEASE something before the end of October that WILL end up making at least $1. The challenge is a fun way for us to see how close we can get to the initial objective but even if we think it’s pretty sure our games could make $1 each there’s no way of knowing when for sure.

Enough talking and back to work now.

Tags: Flixel, machine22, psychoavatar games

I’ll keep this brief so it’s not too spammy for just one game.

I’m working with Over00 (and two lovely artists) to create a game for the October challenge. We’re making an RPG because we’re crazy. Well, my pseudonym is “Psychochild”, so it fits…

The game’s name is The Fae’s Wyrd; fae meaning faerie (fairy) or elfin, wyrd meaning fate or future. It’s also a pun on “the fae is weird”. Over00 challenged me to explain why it’s not a roguelike: it’s not because you’re going to be controlling a party, not a single character. The focus will be more on combat rather than solving neat puzzles, although that might come along in sequels that can be developed over more time.

This is also the first public project for a my new company, Psychoavatar. (I told you we were crazy!) Hopefully this first project won’t kill us.

Anyway, I’ll probably be posting a bit on my game development blog as we progress and I’ll post the game up on here when it’s done. Anyway, thanks to the fine folks here for giving a challenge to get us into motion.

Tags: flash, psychoavatar, psychoavatar games, RPG, the faes wyrd

So yeah I’m gonna do this October Challenge thingie. Hopefully I’ll be able to complete this before the month is over.. Anyways I guess I’ll say a little about myself first, I’m a 16 year old kid that likes making iPhone games. So obviously, the platform I’ll be working for this on will be the iPhone ^_____^

So basically the project I’ll be working to complete will be a ragdoll sandbox game.. just spawn little stickfigures, boxes, weapons, and throw em around or shoot em at each other. Kind of like Pocket God but a bit more violent ahah. Still designing the thing out so if you have any ideas for this I would love you hear them(: Heres a pic of my current design for this ^_____^

Since I finished my LD18 entry: Robots <3 Monster I’ve been working on an Iphone version of the game. I’m getting close to finishing the game and I’ll try to do a few blogposts about the process.

The name has been changed to Explosive Love and here’s the menu screen:

Explosive Love Menu Mockup

I’ll try to post some screenshots later today.

Submissions are closed (and you can’t say I didn’t give you enough time!). mad props to all who entered

> you can check out all the games by clicking this sentence here <

we had a total of 9 games made, some of them by first-time LDers, and from what I’ve played so far they are all looking pretty good too, make sure to check them out!

so, now that’s out of the way we can all get on with this october challenge business!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 8:18 am and is filed under MiniLD #21. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve started work on my entry for the October challenge. Its a simple arcade like shooter with a couple of enemies. The main feature of the game is that it changes the amount of enemies depending on how well the player is doing, each wave. Providing that new game feeling for a lot longer.

I’m making this game for the iPhone/iPod Touch, with openFrameworks.

I dont have a working version of the game yet, so there is no pictures but I should have some by the end of the week.

I had a bit of a slow start over the first weekend, but made up for it somewhat yesterday and this morning, so I’m in for the October challenge after all!

I’m making a trading / crew management game which I’m calling Airship Traders. It’s set in your standard fantasy world, except in this world wizards are a dime a dozen, so being a wizard doesn’t really make you very special – you have to go the extra mile, like becoming a rich and famous Airship Trader for example!

Having learnt from LD18 that I’m not very good at art / graphics I’m scaling back graphical ambitions way back this time round – going to go for a fairly simple 8-bit look similar to that of Chaos: Battle of Wizards. This game will include a bunch of personal firsts, including:

1. Non-trivial mouse based interface (Working)
2. Map larger than the screen (Working – with a functional mini-map)
3. Mix of random-generated and file-based content (TODO :P)

I’m developing in Java with Slick2D and here’s my first screenshot (just colored boxes for now, graphics will be added once the gameplay is working):

Towns, trade goods, large map with mini-map and mouse controls - all working :-)

In terms of trying to sell my game, I’m not even going to bother with app-stores (they all seem to require that I learn a new set of development tools or APIs, which is a bad idea considering the complexity of my game PLUS I’m in South Africa, which isn’t supported by Google App Store and probably some others – I didn’t even bother to check the rest).

My plan for selling a copy is to have a free-to-play 15 minute demo downloaded from my website (with ads), with a PayPal payment required to buy the full game that doesn’t have a time limit (I think this is similar to what BigFishGames does). This will entail making some improvements to my website, so my deadline for finishing the game is 23 October, so that I can dedicate the last week to building the sales infrastructure. If that looks like its not going to happen before the deadline, I’ll probably go to one of the handful of Java games portals with ad-revenue sharing and just try to drive traffic there from my website.

Good luck to everyone participating! I’m already having tons of fun, hope you all do too!

Last Ludum Dare 48 Hour Compo I failed to make enough progress by Saturday afternoon and I retreated. The next day I decided that I would take a look into the game engine Unity that I know a few people in #ludumdare use. It looked pretty neat so I decided that I would use my “Enemies as Weapons” idea as a test game to learn the Unity editor and play around with the scripting.  A month later, not a whole lot of progress was made, but I did end up getting a little used to Unity and it isn’t completely overwhelming anymore. Last weekend I upgraded to 3. 0, took a look at MonoDevelop and liked what I saw. I am in the process of migrating my JavaScript code over to C#, which may be a smidgen more difficult to deal with than JavaScript in some ways but is much more powerful.

The Game

The working title is LoneStranger’s UFO Defense (How original! It will look nice next to LoneStranger’s Caverns, LoneStranger’s Shredder, LoneStranger’s Islands…. and should also not to be confused with XCOM: UFO Defense). It’s a side view, single screen game where you have to defend your people from the invading alien invasion force. Along the way you will use captured and scavenged alien technology to build up better weapons and defenses. I have a little dude that runs back and forth along the bottom, and a random-moving UFO in the sky. The player can shoot non-lethal bullets at the moment.

An early shot of the UFO Defense game.

I’m currently putting together the full gameplay docs, and along with that, the desired feature list. I will then split the list into “must have” and “would be nice” and “maybe sometime in the future” categories. Furthermore, the features in the “must have” category will be ranked based on an implementation order that makes sense. Anything on the “must have” list should be in before the end of the month, and I should really have most of those implemented before working on the “would be nice” list. The lists will be the topic of a future post.

Platform

My target platform is the web using the Unity web player. I know it’s not as widespread as Flash, but it’s what I’m using and that’s what I’m stuck with.

As far as my revenue making strategy, I don’t think I want to bother with any official sites, though that may change. My current plan is to host it on my own website and throw some ads on the page. I am already signed up with Google AdSense, and that is probably what I’ll use unless I do a little research and find something else that pays better. Advertising the game itself might be a challenge and will have to be word of mouth initially. As with some other PoV Challengers, I feel the goal of October is to make the game, not necessarily make the target profit.

Challenges

TV in general is a big time suck. My wife and I recently signed up for Netflix and added a lot of movies to our queue. I’ll probably be drawn to about one or two movies a week, but if I’m disciplined enough on non-movie days, I should be ok. Pandora and my headphones are a great way to focus energy toward the project. Other web things I usually peruse each day might be another timesuck, but again, discipline will be key.

Artwork isn’t a strong point of mine, but I do have a couple friends that draw. They have both told me in the past they won’t hesitate to do things for any games I make. The plan here would be to finalize all artwork sometime in the next week or so and ship them off my sketches and requirements so I can get it all back before the deadline.

Music shouldn’t be a challenge in it’s most simple form, since Wolfram Alpha can make some really fitting backround tunes. However, I would like to take this a step further. More on this in a future post.

The Future

Of course, I should keep at least one blurry eye on the future and make sure that I’m designing something that could be easily ported to another platform. I’d love to do a iOS game if I felt that this was taking off (and it paid for the Unity add-on itself). Things like control scheme and display would have to take this into account.

And….GO!

I already started, but now that I’ve made my first post it really feels like a compo… only longer and with a better goal!

Tags: screenshot

It’s time we unveil our game! This is the first concept actually created by both me and Smiley over at Area 161. (Technically, there was Tiny the Blog but that was just me at the 360|iDev game jam sans Smiley) Our code name for the game is (drumroll please):

DARTS

Yeah, I understand codenames are supposed to be…well, codes. However, we’re still new to game dev and so we’re saving all of our creativity for the game itself and perhaps the real game name. Remember, I’m also the one that said it was safe to discuss your ideas publicly, so that’s what we’re doing. Now, I know what your thinking, “Darts? Really? All this talk about story, originality, ground breaking interaction, etc and they come up with darts?”

Some key factors to the game design:

1. Multiple devices – Our darts are going to use iPods and iPhones as the dart device with the iPad being the dartboard. It’s something that seems to make sense for us and still unique. We actually had the idea around WWDC, but have been waiting for GameCenter to make it to the iPad which finally is happening with iOS 4.2. It’s not a new idea or even all that novel, but it’s still unique enough to be different.

2. Dart types – This is where we will differentiate ourselves. There’s a ton of serious dart games out there for both the iPad and iPod. Ours is NOT going to be joining their ranks. Ours is going to be completely different. While we are taking the basic game of darts as the basis for our mechanic, that’s about where it stops. See, it’s not that we think that darts as a game isn’t fun. However, let’s face the truth. Darts is not world’s most favorite past time. Therefore, we have an idea of how to introduce some more fun into the game. To give you an idea, here’s some concept art for the darts:

A couple of dart types

That is what you’ll see on the dart device whereas this is an idea of what you might see once the dart lands on the dart board:

Concept Landed Dart

We have some other creative ideas as well, but we haven’t fleshed them out yet. Therefore, you’ll have to tune in to our next week’s post to get a deeper view into the game.

The main artist for the game art is my dad. Smiley and I are way rusty on our art skills, so we needed someone who actually knew what they were doing. My dad has been an artist all his life, most of it professionally as a graphic artist. He’s retired now, so he needs something to keep him busy. According to him, the sketches above show how “rusty” he is. His “rusty” beats our best efforts, hands down. LOL It’s also neat to have him contribute to the design of the game in addition to being “just” the artist. How can you not look at that concept art and get inspired?

Technical Update:

The past week was getting a rough game engine in place to put up screens, load/play sounds and figure out simple sprites. We coulda used Cocos-2D, but I figured that we’re going to eventually be pushing the boundaries of iOS as far as interaction, etc in future games. Therefore, rolling our own will likley be an eventual thing, so we better get our learn on now. This week is going to be nailing down the throw mechanic. I have some ideas of how to do it technically in my head, but we’ll see if I can actually translate that into compilable Objective-C code!

All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time for us as a company. We’re in the throes of building our first game and we have a crazy deadline to hit. We’re starting to feel like real game developers for the very first time and we’ll be honest, the feeling is pretty intoxicating.

Tags: Area 161, concept art, iOS Game

I’m accepting PoV’s October Challenge: Make a game, sell 1 copy. I’m going to extend and polish Stacker, my Ludum Dare 12 entry. It is the most complete game and best of all my Ludum Dare entries. I also have some ideas about how to make it more interesting than the current scheme of moving the goal line higher and higher each level.

Serendipitously, Unity 3.0 was released last week. I’ve been eyeing using it in future projects for a few weeks now, and have actually done several tutorials and watched a bunch of videos online. I was particularly impressed with the Visual Studio integration. If I had known about that earlier, I would have tried it much sooner. In the past, engines, frameworks and languages have caused me much gnashing of my teeth because their IDE was so painful.

Stacker in action

Here are some screenshots of my October Challenge Entry: Explosive Love:

Start Screen

Instruction

Gameplay

Gameplay2

End screen

Well progress has been coming since I last posted the Splash screen.  I have been working on some tools, in particular the track editor.  I remain vague about my game idea for the current time, but it will be a racing game; for all intent and purposes.  I am focusing efforts on being unique, and a thorough google search only brought up 2 other “personal” projects/attempts at what I am doing.  I am hoping that serves to my advantage, but I am happy to know I have an idea that is more original than just making an Pac-Man clone with different theme.

So about this track editor; I spent my day Sunday working on starting it, and Monday night after work I lost about 3 hours of productivity.  I was beat, muscles aching, etc… and couldn’t concentrate.  However I did manage to get a few productive hours and managed more than I expected for the night.  Undo/Redo capabilities for all current actions:  Add/Delete TrackNodes as well as the ability to Move/Edit the node.  This editor is within the game*, however it will likely be stripped from the release build.

An editor under development for my Sell-a-Game Challenge.

I have been wondering quite a bit whether or not I should implement undo/redo.  I estimate it will take 3x or so longer to maintain the actions, but I also believe it will save time when designing/developing more tracks.  I plan on a minimum of 5 tracks, but hope for more than that.

Tonight I’ve started by writing this post, soon I will begin working on building the actual track from the nodes above.  I am hoping that doesn’t take me all night.  I want to do more than just that, but at this time I have nothing else planned, as I can’t think what comes next.

*Although it is within game, I have an EditorFramework that acts as an external editor; giving me advantages of a professional looking interface, menus and more.

A few hours later. . .

Well, I did manage to get somewhere tonight.  Even further than just getting the track surface built from the nodes.  Although, I didn’t get the track textured, yet, I did manage to build it quickly.  Also I sent it off to a partner of mine, and fixed several small editor ‘issues’.  Added saving/loading of editor settings for convenience , undo/redo still fully working.  (Redo for the move action was previously broke!)  Here is a small image of the track being built from the nodes:

A track being built from the nodes!

I’ve made some serious progress tonight.

I’ve gotten the basics now working in Unity:

• Yellow Blocks
• Physics and stacking
• Mouse position determines place of new block

I like the 3D-ness the block have now, even though the gamer is interacting purely in a 2D fashion.

Total hours so far: 11.5  This probably means that I’m already ahead of the LD12 pace.

Tags: screenshot

Still Haven’t got a name yet for my game. I’l work on that later.

Today I’ve been working on getting the enemy spawn thingy to work. I should have it done soon, I hope…..

The game isn’t in a playable version yet but my goal is to have one by the end of the weekend, so thats fine. Been tying to get my friend to give me the login details for the iPhone dev centre so I can test the app on my iPad, He wants to see a playable version first…. I don’t think he’s realised I need to test my app every 3 seconds(I’m not joking).

I’m wondering how long it’ll take apple to approve the game,  if I knew It would give me a better idea to get the game done. I’ve heard it can take anything from two days, to three weeks.

-bear

Going for the October Challenge with a Million Dollar game, just need the one sale an I could win! ;o)

A small step forward.  Worked on getting the win condition to trigger.

Stacker Progress Screenshot 10/6

The trigger is firing, but I need to animated the target zone and the fact that you’ve hit it.  The text looks awful too.

I also got some business hat things done as well: signed up for Intel’s AppUp Developer whosywhatisit, Google Checkout thingy and a couple offical business forms with my county.  Can you believe you have to file for a permit to do work in your own home!?!  What is America coming too?  Anyways… tired… must sleep.

Total Hours To Date: 13.75

Hello People.

I’m jayden, 14 years of age, and want to start getting into making small little video games, and thought these challenges would be a good place to start. I was planning on making a 3D FPS in Blender, using it as the main 3D tool, and as the Game Engine, but I thought that was kidna cheating. i am looking at using Unreal Engine, and am looking into the legalities and licenses of that. I am not sure if I should od a simple flash game, or something like that. iw ant it to be simple, but not too hard.

This was my first entry into a Ludum dare and I’ve got to say I had a blast, and most of all I learned a lot.

It started with a Friday afternoon pixel sketch of a guy on a BMX. And with that I went full steam ahead and created a game with a wry sense of humour. The game has generally been panned as not being fun, and I have to agree. It’s hard to take creative criticism seriously, even harder when it comes from 4chan, but the fans will be your harshest critics, so you should listen when they speak.

Hit the jump for the specifics and nitty gritty of the game.

To make this game I went with Flixel and FlashDevelop. Firstly, I’m a huge Canabalt and Gravity Hook fan, so it made sense to use what they use. I’m still pretty astounded that Flash gives away their whole deal for free! You can make Flash games without paying Adobe a cent. I chose to take advantage of this.

I used Photoshop CS5 at work to make some of the pixel art, and they have made some great improvements if you are a pixel artist. If you zoom in the pixels are shown with grid lines automatically. I thought that was a great move by Adobe.

I coded using Actionscript, and I highly recommend the book Flash Game University by Gary Rosenweig if you’ve never coded games in Actionscript before. Or if you are a pro, dive right in, it’s not hard at all, and Flixel has made it super easy.

High scores and ads are by MochiMedia. These weren’t as easy to implement using FlashDevelop as it was when I did earlier games using Flash CS3. But I got them working. I am thinking of doing a tutorial for getting them working, but I want to try out getting Social elements of Mochi’s API first. If anyone really wants these tutorials let me know.

And now the game!

Picking Up Chicks is Hard When Your Car is a BMX

I tried to troll 4chan with my own advertising campaign but no one took the bait.

And yes, I did earn a dollar! $2.04 so far, making a grand total of $55.05 over my game making career at Mochi.

I think I may have got a name now! I’m thinking of calling it space waves.

Today I’ve fixed the accelerometer so that tilting the device now works, and I’ve also been able to get my iPad to run the app. My friend gave me the login and I spent like 2 hours tying to set it up, still better than him though! ha.

The next thing I need to do is make the enemy spawn thingy work, which is the main part of this project. The game is turning out to be relatively simple to make, which is good for the time I have left.

Oh and also I have a screen shot now! Shows how far I am though the project very well.

-bear

Well, I don’t have any screenshots to share tonight.  I could make one of the MainMenu, but really – not worth it.  Just take my word.  I do have drop-shadows on some text, which is pretty neat.  But besides that, it is extremely bland, rotten colors and just needs to be touched up during the next phase of the project.

Alpha is all about getting all the features finished and working, and the main menu is working.  Both keyboard (up,down,enter) and mouse (movement, left-click) selection support.  I wasn’t planning on starting the MainMenu and linking up a few other game-states (with no actual implementation yet), until later, but I made a mistake yesterday that I need to be aware of in the future; especially on this project with such limited time.

BlackBird’s Lesson:

I hope you can learn from my simple mistake; Don’t get caught up in things that don’t matter. Yesterday I was working on the editor, I got the track textured – looking a bit better now, and a handful of other little things.  But most of my time 3hrs or so, was spent on a specific tool.  It does have a use, but it also was a waste of time to spend more than 15 to 20 minutes on such a tool.  Yet I added all sorts of little features/behaviors to this tool and I must brag, it came out awesome.  But afterwards I realized that it didn’t do anything to the actual track.  It helps edit the track, but it doesn’t edit the track.

So I didn’t actually make much progress since the tool I added is just a nicety, and not a requirement.  I decided to take a step back from the editor tonight and start working on the gamestates for a change of pace.  I know a lot of you LD’ers are shooting for Oct 31st to release by, but I won’t be releasing until early to mid December at the absolute earliest.  Although, I will be completing Alpha by October 31st.  Any features not completed by that date, will effectively be cut from the project.

I expect it to take the full month of November to polish up the features, and reduce the bug count as much as possible before releasing.  This process will likely go into December, however after October 31st I can not, and will not, add any new features.  I promise I won’t.  (Hmm, will I?)

It was a real fight tonight getting the “Win” to be displayed nicely and in red. Took me a while to understand the relationship between the GUIText and a font material. Brother, sure wish I had figured it out faster.

Stacker Progress 10/7

On the business hat side of things I discovered that PayPal now has a microtransation option to their pricing structure and signed up. I have my reservations about the trustworthiness of PayPal after all the stories I’ve heard, but this will be my best option if I price Stacker at $1 like I was thinking.

Next Action: Some sort of visualization for the target area you are building the tower to.
Total Hours To Date: 15.75

Tags: screenshot

I’m still going along rather slowly, but I think I’ve made enough progress in the last couple of days to justify an update again :). I failed to stick to the promise I made myself that I won’t add graphics until the gameplay is working, so here’s the much nicer 2nd screenshot:

Towns, Terrain, Basic Trade Goods, Basic Town Simulation, Basic Random Map Generation, Loading data from file - all working :)

Gameplay isn’t really happening yet, so the priority list of features to implement next are:

1. Airships (essential for gameplay)
2. Trade Interface (essential for gameplay)
3. Better Town Simulation (essential for sustainable gameplay)
4. Better Map Generation
5. Fog of War / Exploration

This project is probably more than I can do in a month, but I’ll be happy if I can manage about 60-80% completion, I can always still polish after October and then start selling it (it’s at least designed to have enough gameplay to be salable ;-)) . Still having lots of fun with this project! 😀

A week ago I announced my entry for PoV’s October Challenge, an old-school 4X space game (ala Master of Orion) for the iPad called Distant Star. I’ve made a fair amount of progress since that announcement; Distant Star has gone from a pile of half-finished tech and ideas to a rough playable prototype. Almost all the core features are in place: ship construction, exploration, colonization, combat. Of course, to be properly playable I needed a few basic AIs — at the moment, you can play against two simple, deterministic AI players, each with their own play style (one colonizes recklessly, while the other builds up small fleets and attempts to capture one system at a time).

Introducing some simple AI players helped point out all kinds of multiplayer bugs I’d introduced so far — turns out none of my fog of war code worked at all, and resource accumulation was completely borked. The first game I played the AI wiped me out almost instantly.

Things are not looking good for the red player...

Based on some early, vicious usability feedback I’ve made some subtle changes to the map interaction, restricting scrolling outside of the galaxy and highlighting fleets or systems when they were selected. I also played around with a real-time version of the game, but quickly realized that, while it made the early game much more pleasant, things got way too hectic once the AI acquired more than a handful of high-quality planets. They started building ships far faster than the player, especially if the player’s empire was quite spread out. Back to turn-based I went.

Can't. Keep. Up.

Up next: research management. Bring on the tech tree!

Tags: screenshot

Well I think I’ll try to make something for the October challenge. My only possible chance of making a sale, I think, is to make an iPhone game, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Because my free time is sparse, I was thinking I’d port over a game I made for an 84-hour compo. That way, I can spend less time drawing and planning and more time just finding the bits about the game that were fun. Also in the interest of saving time, I might make this in Unity, although I hadn’t decided. If I don’t, I’ll just use the iPhone framework I already have and find some iPhone 2D physics library I can use – does anybody know any good ones?

I’m going to port over “A Lasting Impression.” You can find it here: http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,19135.0.html

I think its main improvements will come from creating a challenge before the time limit is up. Currently, you can get kids angry when you take their bubble gum and they run around and knock things over, but that’s the only challenging bit at all. What I’d like to do is add in more things that can potentially mess up your stack of stuff if you don’t deal with them, like angry dogs, popping-up prairie dogs, gusts of wind, and the like. Plus, I think I will get rid of the whole items falling from the sky thing and replace it with every single item being added by something. As in, an airplane might fly by, and if you throw something at it then it crashes and explodes into debris you can use, balloons float by occasionally or are attached you kids (and you must pop them to get them to come down), etc. These sorts of things will make the game much more fun that it is, I think.

Today I made it so if your ship went to the edge of the screen it will come out the other side. Other than that I’ve been working on the title screen.

Didn’t do much today, but this weekend I’l properly be coding for hours on end. I’m would like an proper running version by the end of the weekend for bug testing.

Thats the title screen so far.

Contrasaurus: Defender of the American Dream

We’ve been working on Contrasaurus for some months now, and with the opportunity to partake in the October challenge we now have double the reason to push hard to wrap it up. The premise is your standard dino-action-thriller. You are summoned into the future to save America from the dark Communist forces that are amassing in Nicaragua. After completing the mission and receiving the highest honor a top-secret military dinosaur can receive a terrible truth is revealed. Finally you seek out those whom you depend on most, only to have your darkest suspicions confirmed.

The game is nearly complete. Although it’s been publicly available to anyone who knows the url for some time, we’re aiming for a real “launch” on Sunday. You’re all invited to the pre-launch, starting now, to help us find out any last minute issues and iron out any bugs. Please leave comments and let us know about any bugs or comments you have, we’ll really appreciate it!

The game is HTML5 based, so requires a modern browser to play. For best results I recommend Chrome. (Firefox “works”, but is generally unplayably slow, Safari and Opera may work as well.)

We added a donate button for now, though we’re not entirely sure of the best strategy to actually make money. Do we still win the challenge if we sell at least $1 but are still way in the red profit-wise?

I created a nice visual target, literally, to aim for. It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to visually display the target separate from the collision mesh. Including, a slow walk down a lane called Child-Parent Scripting Confusion. But, now it is functional.

October Challenge Progress 10/8

Next Action: Level Two
Total Hours To Date: 18.25

Tags: screenshot