Well, almost three hours after start, ive made some good progress with my game:

Its a weird mix of a platformer and an arena shooter.. well see how the idea turns out.. The style, as some of you might notice, is a bit inspired in FlashPunk (even if the game itself is made with GameMaker).
The gameplay is not even close of being done, only the platform engine, and a bit of a preview of the enemies.

im going to bead im tired and i need to sleep on the idea i have 😀
g-night every one!

This time, I decided to start with the title screen! No, the title isn’t final. :p
Well I’ve decided to only use up to three colors per graphic, so this is what the game will look like all the way through. I’ll make it look better tomorrow, hopefully.

Tags: friday, title screen

It’s only 1 AM, but having never programmed a basic platformer before, my meager attempt to get jumping has failed miserably for the past 2 hours or so. I should probably finalize an idea first. All of them are probably unoriginal, though I have a few scenarios I think are interesting. I think that’s what I’ll do. I keep of thinking of ideas and then settle on making the game on the most interesting one, not necessarily the one I think I can get done on time. How else am I supposed to improve if I don’t push myself? For, now, G’night!

Awoke at 3.10am GMT (BST).

Perfect, as the compo had started but 10 minutes ago!

The theme: ENEMIES AS WEAPONS! Not my personal choice but..

I decided on a platformer. A no-ladders type of tile-based engine.

After a nice conversation with someone from #ludumdare, I decided the end-of-level aim is to get to from start point to a door. And something about (maybe) background interaction.

So setting is in the desert perhaps.. inside of large “ruined” structures, which would account for complex/strange levels. Fixed screen.. will save time on having to set up a scroll, etc.

I’ve designed the enemy sprite.. which you get to incapacitate, then pick up. You can throw the enemies at other enemies, which will make possible taking out more than one at a time.

If I sound vague, I’m actually hiding the main “secret” of game-play for now. Sure, I haven’t started coding yet. Was too busy faffing around looking for people to “jam” with.

Anyway time for some breakfast and then we are all GO!

Here’s the player playing gm-prac01.vgm and *looping* it.

http://pubacc.wilcox-tech.com/~greaser/stuff/ld18/gm-d001.jar

Now I need to get VDP emulation working.

Putting the finishing touches on the intro, in which you:
A.) “Talk” to god
B.) Watch a cruise ship get destroyed by a gigantic tentacle

First Demo Screenshot

So I’ve got the player movement down (WASD and MOUSE), and a stationary enemy that randomly shoots at you. Left clicking lets the player boost temporarily and creates a ghost trail that changes the direction of bullets that pass through it to the direction of the player. So basically you are invincible and can manipulate bullets when boosting, but are vulnerable when in normal mode. I think I’ll include a simple level up system to increase the size and length of the ghost boost as you progress. Gotta fix my wall collisions first though…

Tags: juhkystar

After thinking long and hard, I got an idea which should be fun, complicated, and sure to never be done in time! The reason I say this is it’s because it’s a fighting game, which includes a lot of animation, different characters, stages, and complicated computer AI. I decided to go with a somewhat sloppy old-school art style, which hopefully and up looking both good and not take much time to create. Screenshot for the curious:

Progress

Development is coming along at a speedy rate, what you can see here at the moment is a nearly complete assault system with those little robots quickly spawning only to blow up on the defenses, depleting the top bar.

Yummy cereal + chocomilk

I’ve been brainstorming ideas for the first 3.5 hours.  I decided to go with Idea #3 (Mind Control).

Basic game will be a top-down arena shooter.  Player can mind control one nearby enemy at a time, but the catch is that the player can’t move while doing mind control.  Will hopefully make for some interesting hit-and-run gameplay.

Tags: journal

I’m a bit late with the intent declaration, but meh, I’m late with the start, too.

I have to run a zillion errands tomorrow, so at least some of the work will be done on this:

As for the theme, I was hoping for double rainbow zombies, but I do have some ideas for using enemies as weapons. I’m planning to work until 4:30 (GMT-8), we’ll see how that goes…

Tags: desk

So, I’ve noticed you can bump up your devspeed if you do one thing at the time. For example.

1) Figure out your general idea
2) Try to make most of your sprites
3) Start on your gamelogic

Instead of:

1) Figure out your general idea
2) Make one sprite
3) Code the gamelogic for that sprite
4) Goto #2

This is also true with sounds, try to do/generate them all at one point instead of constantly switching between your code, your sprite editor and your sound software.

And here’s my first screenshot:

I spent a terrifyingly long time doing basic systems stuff, but finally I’m starting to make tangible progress. Currently there are a movable player and a camera which tracks said player. There are also a set of entities scattered around the landscape. These entities are patiently waiting until they gain the ability to meander about under their own steam.

Since ippa mentioned it, here is the flow I am following

1) Figure out your general idea
2) Try to make most of your sprites
3) Start on your gamelogic

I have the idea worked out, I have all my sprites worked out and the rest of the “art” can be done in code and hopefully I will be on game logic very soon, just have some stuff to think about before hand

Good luck to everyone!

its fun what you can do with 3 rounded rectangles, 1 ellipse and 4 calligraphy strokes in inkscape, add a little bump map in the gimp and BAM decent looking critter

Tags: progress

I have a basic tile editor, tile drawing, character walking about and a 4 direction walk cycle.

Probably the worst walkcycle I’ve ever drawn but whatever.

I’ve got some ideas coming together of specific mechanics I want to play with. My inclination is to wrap those in an action/platformer game, but platformer engines with good solid physics are kind of a pain to write. Maybe it’ll turn into more of a beat-em-up.

This is my first playable prototype. This represents a little under four hours of work in Flash.

Try to draw the enemy orange spikes and red seeker boxes into the yellow circles for points by using your pink pentagon to lure the enemy in. If you hit the enemies you lose points. Basic proof of concept at this point is finished.

It is 2am here and I think I’m quite happy with what I’ve got down for the first evening to sleep on. I’ll be meeting up with 3 other LDers tomorrow over in Portsmouth New Hampshire to continue the game dev in the fun company of others. Sleep now!

Tags: firstday, flash, friday, playable, prototype, screenshot

Well… I’ve got a concept.  Basic game logic is under-way.  Plan is to develop a fully functional game before working on graphics and audio.

Right now I’m just posting bare source.  Binaries will come tomorrow.

http://github.com/acdimalev/acdimalev-competition-ludumdare18

I don’t know why I am tired, but it gets bloody hot in the morning out here, so I guess it is really for the best.  Catch you all in five hours!

But I’m more likely going to work on Prelude in the few spare hours I’ll have than try to get a game happening within them. I actually had a cool idea for it, I’m not sure if I should attempt it though. Might get a sketch up in a bit, however I thought I may as well put out the opportunity for people to complain about me not doing it properly.

There are now two options:

• Work on Prelude, a 2d platforming fort construction game with zombies, where I’ve already got some progress and can use the amazing atmosphere of a LD to boost productivity
• or work on <name TBA>, where you ride rampaging elephant robots into each other for as long as you can until you get stomped.

decisions, decisions.

Don’t have time to participate, sorry. Too much social pressure.

If I had entered, it would have been a spin on this classic:

Robots

Anyway, I’ll hang on the channel every now and then. Have fun!

I’ve finally managed to complete my history homework, so, four hours in, i can start my second LD (YAY :D)

I’ve got a couple of ideas, but i’m not sure. might scan in a few idea sheets, once i draw some up XD

Okay, so after having a bite to eat, and spending way too much time trying to decide what I’m going to do I have come up with an idea. I’m writing up a little console app to test out some of the parts of it, but it should work fine. Will post something more up once I have a clue. Also, I’ve nearly finished writing up my framework.

11x 00y – compare Rx to Ry

05x yyy – add value at yyy to Rx

That’s MY game. >:D

(EDIT: Yes, I know GreaseMonkey said my game is going to be for the Apollo 11 space shuttle. I’m rewriting it.)

First of all, here’s my setup:

I will be livestreaming the entire ludum dare here, as soon as I get started: http://www.mojang.com/live/

I had a few ideas in mind for some of the other themes, especially for skyscrapers. While I had a feeling enemies as weapons might win, I totally wasn’t prepared for it to actually DO so.
So now I’ll start by eating some food and trying to work out what game I’m making. This is going to be FUN! =D

Good luck, everybody! And have fun, for those of you in the jam!

Am I surprised at the progress some people have made!

I at least have a title and text appearing. Plus the core mechanic concepted out.

-Astro Variance

The player is defending his home planet from an alien attack. The player’s weapon systems aren’t comlete but the shields are. The shields deflect incoming shots back to the enemy. The shots also charge a super weapon to discharge after a certain amount of time. The shields have their own depletion rate and recharge rate. If a shield is down and the player gets shot, then the player loses some of their health points.  If they don’t switch to a new shield before it hits 0, the player dies.

That’s all I got. Hopefully I”ll have a snazzy star field to show off in the morning.

I’m backpedaling again.

Irrlicht wants to use real time (As opposed to a limited frame rate), but my lappy doesn’t like real time processes.

Now I’m not sure what I’ll do. Ah well, failure is always an option!

Tags: screenshot

I made some base code for my idea, and now, I’m going to sleep.

There is almost nothing visible up to now, and nothing of gameplay implemented, however, for the sake of the LD spirit, I’m uploading it:

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1282369762

I hope I have a good start tomorrow,

Good nights to everyone!

Early work on aDeathFromAbove

I’ve decided that, lacking the ability to develop nice things under C++ and Irrlicht, I’d like to use AS3 and FlashPunk.

More updates as things start to happen.

Yay, LD48! And nr 18 no less!

I will stream my fiddlings here: http://www.livestream.com/depstv

And I’m called deps81 on twitter if you would like to see my mad tabling as the deadline closes in.

Good luck everyone else!

So I hate physics engines and I want engines to apply an impulse to the ship that both pushes and turns it. I made up a bit of physics that sort of makes sense to me and I’m ok with the result.

I tried to put an interactive flash thing in this post, but it disappeared when I hit publish.

Am I doing something wrong?

Tags: flash, limited progress

Apparently I decided to make music instead of a game! Of course, it’s music for a game. Might be obvious, I suppose.

Here’s my instruments. Pretty cool, hey?

Unfortunately I can only play the piano and bass guitar, but that’s something.
Oh, and here’s my recording set-up. Distinctly less cool, but very indie?

Good morning, good evening good day or whatever your local time is…

I’m in with a super mario like platformer. I’ll use flixel, flashdevelop, tiled, paint.net, sfxr and my awesome typing speed for the job. Unfortunatley, I’ll be visiting the malmöfestivalen this weekend, and that means that I wont be working on the game after18.00, since then I’ll be listening to free live music

As the title might suggest, I found inspiration! All I have so far is the title and intro, tomorrow I’ll record the voice-acting part of the intro, and the I’ll get working on something relating to actual gameplay! I’d like to thank Hamumu/Mike Hommel, since it was while reading his list of ideas that I got mine.

The concept is pretty simple: Use the bullets of turrets shooting at you to do… stuff (break the mechanism holding down a gate, etc.) It’s not horribly unique or amazing, but I plan on making the interesting part the story and/or the atmosphere. Anyways, have a pic

got my (non animated, cause I am being realistic here and need to focus on code) sprite sheet up and ready, and mapped, next is to do some polygon magic to set bounding boxes

for those who are not in the know, the gimp and most other image packages have the option to do “web slicing” which in the gimp fires up a window and you can outline what you want and it spits out a plain text file for use on the web with xy coords, along with rectangle and circle you can also do polygons, which makes it point n click easy to slice up a sprite sheet and define bounding “boxes”

I am no artist, but if you know your vector image editor (inkscape in this case) and a little bit of image editor (gimp in this case) you to can produce some meh sprites heh

Tags: progress

Well I wasn’t all that happy with the theme to start with (last night I was saying that it was the only theme I really didn’t want). I prefer to make non-violent games, obviously this theme isn’t great for that.

Anyway, some brainstorming and a shower later and I had an idea that I liked. Maybe it’s not such a bad theme after all. It’s not going to be straightforwardly violent either, so thats cool too.

Working on getting the basics down at the moment:

Jumped off IRC (I’m lurking as spiridios there) to go to bed then decided I needed to at least get FPS showing to prove the game loop works! Working in Javascript/HTML because I couldn’t get Slick 2D to work as an applet (some kind of permissions problem).

I wake up, eat somethin’, start the computer, “Enemies as Weapons”… Feck.

Oh well, I said I would do it and I am going to do it.

Ideas, Ideas…

Tags: You read the tags ? Beef sauce . Ludum Dare #18

I have to say, moving into Flex and FlashPunk is a weird feeling for me. I never thought I’d develop in Flash, but I’m actually really looking forward to it.

At the moment, I’m trying to get AXDT (AS3 plugin for Eclipse) working so I can get to work on my game.

This is strange, but kinda cool.

Ok so this will be my first LD woooo!

with that in mind, I’m also working on another random game jam with a few friends! O_O;

I’m not sure how on earth I am going to get two game jams done simultaneously  but I think I’ll have a go 😀

My simple level editor so I can make some levels, I suppose.

I figured I’d give it a try. C# with XNA. Got my beautiful sprite moving about.

“Enemies as Weapons”, eh? Fell asleep last night with that idea ringing in my head; woke up excited with an idea that I’ve been hacking on ever since. The trouble is that I don’t really like to do ‘enemies’ in my games, much less ‘weapons’ — I’m sort of a nonviolent guy. But I’ve got something anyway, even if it is a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, the real reason for this post: breakfast. It has been consumed.

Note: this does not double as a desk photo. That's my craft/writing desk, not my code desk.

Tags: foodphoto

2 screens for the price of one!

Two screens attached. So far I have the random map generation system, the player group generation, and enemy type generations completed. Art wise I have completed the first few of the background tiles. I decided to make them look like a board game tile (like Catan). Hopefully that will aid to my lack of art talent.

Hi everyone! It’s my first time entering the Ludum Dare. Still not exactly sure on everything to do with my game idea.
Code will be going up on github here, as I develop it:

http://github.com/grahamedgecombe/ld18

It’s written in Java and will probably be distributed via an applet or webstart.

So, just woke up about six hours in and saw the theme – Enemies as Weapons.
Very nice

I’ve had the idea of doing a top down scrolling shooter for a stupidly long time, but never really sat down to get it done. This shall be the weekend it gets a prototype at least!

Think of Uridium as an 8-way scroller, where you additionally have a grappling hook to swing yourself around the super structure if you wish, or to smash enemies into one another, or collect pickups, or any number of useful maneuvers a grappling hook affords. That’s pretty much what I have in my head.

That means the main proponent of the game will be this sodding grappling hook, so I best get that done as soon as possible, especially as I suffer from “math fail.”

As LD18 has now started, and I have zero framework/engine available to work with, it’s going to be a “from scratch” entry with my trusty GCC, and SDL providing the brunt of the back bone.. and I may have a look in seeing how quick I can get some Lua scripted action going.

Now, for breakfast and work!
Good Luck, Everyone

A very coarse design is ready. GUI is prototyped as you can see in the pic.

My Idea:

2 Bases sending out units. Every base can build towers to switch their enemies into friends and therefor use them as weapons. They can also be made stronger. But since the mind-controlling towers have a failure rate, it is risky to make units stronger!

Hope that will add to some tension and will result in a funny game.

AI will be the tricky part, I think.

Lets rock as long the coffee is hot!

This was such a terrible idea.

…and gutted that Double Zombie Rainbow didn’t win, but the themes I want never win.

Anyway, having set my alarm to 3am so I could check the theme (I seem to get more interesting ideas when I’m only half-awake) and go straight back to sleep, I have my idea.  I’m currently reading Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘City of Saints and Madmen’, and obviously have fungus on the brain.  So the game’s going to be a kind of ambient sidescrolling shooter/non-shooter.  It’s set in this long cave that’s full of fungi, and the player’s job is to scan all the different types.  The catch being that the cave is also full of floating spores, and whenever the player collides with one, a toadstool grows on the hull of their ship.  A toadstool which shoots bullets.  Which destroy fungi.  And then the more fungi you accidentally destroy, the more the cave starts to fight back, with boulders falling from the ceiling, spores which kill you if you touch them, etc.  There’ll be two endings depending on how successful you were at dodging spores.

My plan of attack goes as follows:

Day 1:

• Do the graphics for the ship, cave, rocks, spores, bullets, 5 or 6 fungi (I’ll be doing the graphics as watercolours).
• Code as much of the game as possible.

Day 2:

• Do the music.
• Paint as many fungi as possible while still leaving time to…
• …finish the coding.

And I’ll finish with a picture of my desk and my breakfast (porridge with honey and a little cinnamon; being still half-asleep I accidentally made twice as much as I intended):

It’s been roughly 7 hours since I started working on my game, and it’s starting to shape up. I’m pretty happy about myself. I got the random level generation down and basic weapons. Tomorrow I do AI, and hopefully sunday if I have time more weapons and some polishing. For now, I figure 7 hours of sleep ought to do it.

Sadly where I live Ludum Dare started early in the morning, I was asleep by then, but I’m off to a kick start with player sprites on my soon-to-be-named game, weapons are so far : Dual pistols, a bird, and a bomb with legs (no ripoff of mario lol)

The Development is going along nice and fast. Next steps here are to make a menu system and maybe achievements.

Ok, so my first LD and I’m not exactly off to a flying start.  I’ve managed to get an image loaded and moving about the screen, and that’s it for implementation 😛

Decided roughly on the game that I’m going to be making, and started creating a timeline on my company’s public website.

http://www.bitshiftstudios.co.uk/tiki-index.php?page=Kal_LD18

Not sure if that URL is going to show up correctly when I make the post, so if not, either:

• Look for ‘Kalakian’ on twitter, where I have a link to the project site
• or) In google, search for “BitShift Studios” – should be the first link.  Then, just select “LD18, Kalakian” from the projects menu

There’s nothing much to see anyway, but I’ll be uploading some concept and screenshots at some point

It is a puzzle game

Why is “break” in quotes? NOBODY KNOWS…

Anyway, here’s more of my progress for those of you who are interested. So far I haven’t delved that deep into the gameplay side of things, I DO however have a nice platform engine programmed. It’s always nice to get things like that out of the way early.

Anyway, here’s some more screenshots! 😀

More of the conversation with “God” at the beginning. I should stop spoiling this but I’m pretty proud of the dialogue.

What is this? A cruise ship? … hmmm.

Oh boy, it’s the title screen!

The very minimal progress I’ve made with the first area.

Also, YES the gameplay will pertain to the theme. I had plenty of time to plan it out while I worked on the intro lol.

Hi everyone.

Well I woke up not long ago and have spent some time brainstorming around the theme. I think it’s one of those themes where you either take it literally as intended or do something very clever with it. Not being clever enough, my current idea is simply a vertical shooter where you collect defeated enemies and fire them back. Something I’ve not considered yet is where that cycle begins – but I’m sure I’ll work something out.

Good luck everybody!

Tags: brainstorming, First post

Hi.

First time here. Well after a night well spent I only had a slight hangover, so I decided to take part in Ludum Dare 18. Some background: I’m a Finnish guy around the age of 20 who is studying Game Design in Kajaani University of Applied Sciences. For those of you who enjoy stalking, more info about me can be found on my rarely updated blog.

The Idea

I woke up last night around 6am to get a glass of water. While I was at it, I decided to check the theme for this LD. As you all must know by now, the theme is “Enemies as Weapons”. To be honest, I’m glad it’s anything else than double zombie rainbow. When I went back to bed, I tried to come up with a game idea.

The first game idea I had was some next-gen FPS with nice ragdoll physics where you’d do Jedi trick to plunge your enemies towards each other. Not the most original idea, nor doable in 48 hours. The second idea was much more simpler and I think it’s gonna be the one that I am going with.. I am not gonna tell it now, much funnier to keep people guessing (assuming that someone even reads this :P) but here is a sneak peek on the graphics.

Over and out!

Progress update. I had a small sleep between 5 and 7 as I was getting pretty sleepy and my body still thought it was night time.

Desprite this im making progress:

It doesnt look like much yet, I have mostly been laying the foundations for later development

So far I have the foreground layer in, need the other layers in next then some camera movement, tho Im going to have to get some breakfast soon!

Tags: development, flash, game, hour6, progress, terrain

Finally, after 4 hours of work on an idea that I then gave up, I have something to stick with:

Hope to get gameplay and art finished today, extras, testing and whatever else tomorrow.

So I was awake at 3am or whatever it was when the theme was announced, once I found out I then fell asleep on the sofa, and a few hours later mooched off to bed, now after a few hours of being up and thinking I’ve got some ideas from the theme of ‘enemies as weapons’ but nothing set in stone as of yet which I have to try and do asap and then start working on it, and to get my brain working I’m having some yummy breakfast

yummy

Hopefully once I’ve chosen an idea shortly I’ll do some mockups and pop them up here

On a break now. So far I have a moveable player character and a scrolling background. After the break I will fiddle some more with the background and add the first of 4-5 planned enemies.

The game will be a beat-em-up, and you can throw the corpses at other enemies. You can beat them by hand, but throwing smaller enemies on larger enemies will be much easier, if not the only way. We’ll see. But that’s how I treat this theme. Kill the smaller ones and use them to beat the crap out of the larger ones.

Oh, and thanks for voting down Double Zombie Rainbow… Don’t think you will get away that easy! I going to use that theme as well! Take THAT! 😛

And I’m streaming here if someone’s interested: http://livestream.com/depstv

Here’s what I had for breakfast this morning:

Well, I’m about to call it a night.  I’ve made a lot of progress with my game, and I hope I can finish up the basics of gameplay, tomorrow.

Here’s a screenshot:

Update:  You can play what I’ve got so far, just by clicking this link.  Try to lead the green guy to the red guy!

Hey guys!

Last Ludum Dare (let say 17) my result wasn’t that good. This LD 18, I’ll make it better! Here’s my progress for LD 18.

Here are also some Timelapse images:

The game is still in progress so I might going to finish it until tomorrow. That’s all!

…what was wrong with Double Zombie Rainbow? I had a great idea for that!

Oh well, I slept in and it’s nearly 10am here in the UK, so I’d better get the coffee on and dig out some crayons and a big sheet of paper.

Still not sure which Javascript framework to use or whether I should just do something else like finally try out Rebol or maybe even dust off the FreeBASIC parts of my brain, I’ve not done anything with that for years. Guess I’ll just see what ideas I come up with and which is the best fit.

Good luck everyone.

It’s about 11:00 AM local time and I just now have some time to think about the theme.
I’m enjoying a late breakfast at my favorite fast food restaurant.

So, here’s my idea: It’s going a tower-defense style game, but instead of building towers the player has to drag the enemies from the field into one of a few designated zones to serve as a weapon.

Tags: brainstorming, foodphoto

So here is my breakfast

As for idea, don’t have any in particular that I like at the moment. Theme seem to not inspire me to anything original with mechanics that were not overused already… Infestation games with zombies… Some top down arena survival games with possession mechanics. Or again top down survival games but with dodging and using enemies to kill each other. Mostly things I played hundredths of times already and making one more does not inspire me at the moment. Thinking hardly on what to do with theme like that.

Tags: foodphoto

made some crude animations for my objects, game’s looking pretty weird.

To fit the theme, you have to slow the giant thing down by feeding him little evil stuff.

Well, no idea yet, just trying to pass time with doing useless stuff, like a desk photo! Yay!

My desk. Well, my girlfriends desk, my notebook.

My participation was contingent on being able to finish an as3 tutorial sufficient enough to be able to make a game with.  Turns out there’s something wrong with my version of the tutorial game, and I’m tired enough that I don’t feel like spending anymore time trying to figure out why mine fails and the tutorial demo’s doesn’t.  So it looks like yet another ld of non-participation.  Maybe I’ll be able to do something for LD19.

Hi ! I am a french participant, so I work on this new theme since 3 hour. Very hard to find an idea at the begining but I have think to Age of empires and the idea is here !

So, I will try to make a game which happend on an island (hello LD17). This island has only monk for guards and is like a tower defence except that the monk must convert the ennemies for kill other ennemies.

For the moment, I draw just an island and I work on the pathfinding, thanks to John Eriksson for his library Astar for python : http://arainyday.se/projects/python/AStar/ .

Oh, yes, I forgot that, I will use Python and pygame.

Now, time to shower.

Good luck to everyone.

FlashPunk, when introduced to my IDE, threw up no fewer than 188 error, most of which were cryptic bits of what looked like valid syntax but that AXDT just plain didn’t like.

That said, I’m looking at Flixel now. AXDT doesn’t have any issues with Flixel until I try to compile with it, and then learn that it… I dunno. It’s kinda puzzling. Apparently it’s tough getting it to work, but I found a build script on the Flixel forums that will aparently work.

Tried FlashDevelop in WINE. Requires .NET 2.0. Tried installing that. Install failed, froze, had to log out and back in to close it.

So things are progressing pretty nicely. It’s a while since I’ve put enemies into a game that I’ve made, so doing so is quite a fun challenge.

A first build is available here. Contains movement-y stuff, and a teeny bit of animation. Certainly nothing that special yet, but it’s a solid start.

Thought I’d also share a photo of my rather excessive ‘desktop’ arrangement. My housemates have gone off on holiday for a week, so I’ve decided to claim the entire dining room table to myself:

Also, my housemates being away means I’m looking after this little madam:

As far as I can tell Tinkerbell’s main job this weekend is to be really distracting (and cute).

So, there are 41 hours remaining for those of us crazy enough to take up the 48 hour competition. A few times over the last seven hours I’ve found myself questioning my ability, and whether I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m still barely sitting on an idea that isn’t a blatant rip-off of Kirby, and I’ve had to spend more time than I’d like in relearning Construct, the game creation tool of my choice.

Despite what may seem a daunting situation, I do have a few little ideas I want to pursue, and I have the beginnings of the platforming mechanics on the way. The question now is – can I get something completed in the next 40 or so hours?

Also, have a screenshot of my little testing area. It’s not much, so forgive my non-artist art. But it at least is something, and that’s a lot more than I usually get!

Here is a sample of what I am working on. i don’t feel like packaging it, so if you don’t have Love, go fetch http://love2d.org/

This is a working demo of player movement, map generation, and the menu system. More to come later today.

http://depositfiles.com/files/yqrm49bzk

Here you go, the actual first image of my game ever.

The idea is for you to use the diagrams to interpret my own custom CPU, which runs the actual game.

If you don’t get it, wait for the release.

(the spellcheck is set to Polish, btw, sorry for that)

Just woke up… and I don’t like this theme… need to brainstorm for a bit to find something…

There’s lots of different options (since I can’t find any clever way to “corrupt” the theme):

– Possession mechanics
– Use the bodies of enemies as weapons
– Create new weapons from the body of fallen enemies
– ….

Not terribly original stuff… I’m participating in the jam, so I got a bit more leeway if I can’t find anything decent to do.

Desk photo:

Now to have some breakfast and think about a decent idea…

Tags: deskphoto

It took me about five hours to come up with a good idea, but I finally got one after bouncing ideas off my wife.  I messed around with my basecode for a bit, enabling MIDI support (which was broken), sketched a few things on paper and brainstormed gameplay.  I believe I have a working idea that doesn’t appear to be a game with the theme grafted on.  I’m too tired to continue tonight, so I’ll go to bed now and wake up early to start moving forward….

Tags: ld48_18

I was not at home until now – BUT NOW I AM.
I already have an idea, will start sketching things up soon – hope to have first screen shots in an hour or two…

Good luck to everyone participating!

Tags: late

OK… so, as things have turned out, the only IDE I have around is VS08, so I’ll be using C#, which I’ve only been using for about a week now. Oh well!

For some reason, I was thinking about enemies as weapons earlier, it just popped into my head. The current idea is that rather than literally using enemies as weapons, you’re in some situation where enemies hate each other too. Like… like a Colosseum, that could work! Yeah. So somewhat like Daleks, you have to guide the enemies into each other, but they actually batle in that case rather than exploding. YES! Hooray for a game idea in about 10 mins! 😀

I have finally settled with an idea I’m happy with after multiple false starts with other ideas. So far I’ve got a few levels designed on paper and some silhouette sprites which may end up being the final ones. I don’t think my idea is too ambitious but implementation is progressing slowly since I’m learning pygame at the same time. The sprite on the left is a ‘whisper’ and they spawn from gates (middle), which are powered by power generators (right). I’m going to get some sleep and hope to finish all the core gameplay by the end of the day.

First Ludum Dare, slept a bit late.  Here’s my base code. Handful of geometry, poorly implemented data structures and some alternative image rotation stuff I’ve found useful, and a light-mapped sprite blitter.

I’ll be using FlashDevelop, Pixel Bender, GIMP, SFXR and Audacity (maybe just AS3SFXR).

I’ve a couple of ideas on the theme, but they feel kind of dull and/or predictable for now.  We’ll see!

Inspired by asiekierka. Behold; screenshots!

Looks slightly worse without motion. But not by much.

I have the distinct lack of being able to embed flash. So here’s a link to some music.

Since the compo began, I started liking the theme and here is a first screenshot of my game:

These are some enemys running around randomly bouncing off the walls.

– Folis –

Usually I do mockups. Not this time — me and two friends are entering the Jam, and I’m no longer doing any graphics, just coding.

Basic Idea:

Secret of Mana-esque game where you control an engineer, with robot allies. You get new parts from defeating enemies, which you can use like equipment in say Diablo to upgrade your robots and yourself. You fight a lot of dudes. There isn’t much story. Should be good times!

Go ahead. Play it.

Tags: progress

Well, while I wait for a debug gnash to compile (trying to track down where this freeze on mouseover is coming from), here’s a shot of my current state 5 hours in:

Tags: progress, screenshot

Ever get the feeling that you’re in way over your head?

Last night when the theme was released i worked for an hour before i went to sleep

i woke up and the code i wrote was actually GOOD! (surprize)

anyway, i’m streaming my workfrom start to finish, find me here

Nothing to show as I’ve been writing notes. XD I decided no matter what the theme was, I would do something strange… So the most unlikely thing I could think of was a visual novel. 😀 So that’s what I’m going to make! Hoorah! It will have spies and things!

Oh, and good luck everyone! ^o^

The design of the game is fairly defined at this point. The basic idea is that we control a character who has a fortress, and the fortress is surrounded by wilderness on all sides. We split our time between defense and exploration. The wilderness is occupied by various small enemies, as well as large enemies and enemy fortresses, both of which yield new components.

There are several levels of stationary turrets to discover. There are also replacement cores (which increase the fortress’s component cap), as well as stationary creature pumps which create little swarms of friendly critters. I’m also thinking about a few other ideas, such as minefields and fortifications of various sorts. Moats? Hmm…

Here’s where things stand right now. It doesn’t look like much yet!

I spent the first few hours of the compo grinding out mediocre rendered sprites. It was pretty mindless, which is good as it gave me time to think about my mechanic. “Do I like this idea?” I thought to myself as I adjusted the specular highlight on my wooden cue ball for the umpteenth time. “Does it please me?”

Turns out the answer was yes; the idea I’m working towards seems decent, if underwhelming. The graphics I churned out on the way, though? Useless. Utterly, uglily useless. So I set out to prototype the thing, which went pretty well (hurrah! Prototypes in LD = meta-prototypes). Now to have a bit of a nap and dream about visual styles and blending modes.

It's pool. And also putt-putt. In, err, vector graphics.

The (only) cool bit of all of this is that the course layout (bumpers, starting positions, hole, etc.) is entirely data driven. I’ll need an editor to layout courses; that’ll be part of the game. Obviously. And, really, if I’ve already got an editor how much harder will it be to let players share courses & scores? And how cool would that be?

Tags: physics, pygame, screenshot

I think that settles that…

Oh right, I still need to design and make a game 😉

Tags: catphoto, deskphoto, foodphoto, LD18

Smores attack.  You are a marshmallow and you have to throw the chocolates at each other to make them blow up so you don’t get made into a smore.  The floor is graham cracker and the background is supposed to evoke a campfire.

I’m streaming live from my desktop, so be sure to smile 😛

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/blender-tutorials

Good Luck everyone

PSnake

Tags: desktop, stream

Greeting from Germany!
We are still working on our game for this competition.

After we’ve finished the idea for our game, we are now in the progress of programming. The sprites are nearly finshed and one of the gamestats is also nearly finished!

Now we are working on how to load a level. Now I have to leave, because I have to do some work 😉

Had breakfast (bread and liquid crack AKA Nestea Orange):

and inspiration hit me… I actually got a decent idea!

The idea is a mix of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, Possession Mechanics and Tetris…

An invading army is attacking your castle and you have to possess the right type of enemy to deal more damage to the surrounding units… It’s kind of complicated to explain without visual aids (hopefully, or else I won’t be able to do decent instructions and nobody will understand my game).

I think this is pretty simple to implement, so I won’t use my engine and go back to my old LD#17 framework to do the game… if I’m lucky I’ll be able to make the compo instead of the jam, let’s see…

Going to use placeholder graphics until I have a firm grasp on what I’ll need to actually draw…

Really excited by this one…

Tags: foodphoto