First of all, here’s the timelapse: Making Metagun timelapse

This LD was timed extremely well for me, hitting one of the few free weekends I have these days.
During the voting rounds, I hoped for Skyscrapers, so I could do a life-in-the-city simulation that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. Of course, it didn’t win, but instead the somewhat hard to work with “Enemies as Weapons” won. Because the theme gets announced at like 4 am my time, I was asleep when it got announced, but I managed to wake myself up at about 5 am to see what it was. I stayed up for a couple of hours, thinking about what kind of game I could make, but couldn’t think of anything interesting.

So I got some more sleep. When I got up, I almost felt like giving up. There just wasn’t anything interesting I could do with the theme. But since I had promised people I’d livestream it, I eventually got online and started brainstorming. Not long thereafter, I got the idea of having a gun that shot other people who shot back at the player. I figured it’d make for an interesting platformer mechanic if you yourself were responsible for the dangers in the level.

And strangely, after that, I never ran into any real problems. I implemented some basic physics and rendering framework, then added some graphics, and got started on level design pretty early. I added new features to the game as the levels demanded it, which both meant that new features would get introduced gradually, but also that I didn’t waste any time implementing stuff that never got used.
I felt relatively finished with the game when there was about six hours left, so I spent a few hours just polishing it and adding some fluff features like an ingame credits list and such.

I think I got a bit lucky this time around by finding an idea that fit my style pretty well, but I also felt some experience from old Ludum Dares help me guess how long certain features would take to implement.

What went right:
Almost everything went surprisingly well! I had a great flow this time.

What could’ve been improved:
As usual there is no music. But worse, the jumping still feels a bit off. I should’ve spent more time early on to really nail it.

An absolute void in the way of motivation today has killed my game.

It’s not really in a state to release – and it’s not something that can be done timely for the jam..

Dudes and dudettes, I am out

(yes, I seriously prayed this would be finished)

Delicious entry here.

BOOM! 14 hours later and i’ve done. That was fun haha.
Screeny:

VIEW ENTRY

You can go and download the game at that link above.

Have fun!

Finally !!
see the final version !!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=825

Tags: final, recycling robots

Wow! I’m finished 30 minutes early!   This LD has been a lot of fun.   I learned a lot about Actionscript and Flixel.  There is nothing like a ridiculous deadline to motivate you to learn.  If you’re  interested, checkout my entry: HAckBotZ

Good luck to all those in the compo and also the Jam. I can’t wait to start playing some of the entries!

My last update before submissions are due.

Working tile map

This is my tile map that I got working last night.  I can create new levels in TilED and easily import them into my game.

Collision boxes

About 20 minutes ago I got the collision box generation working.  You can sort of see how my tile graphics are designed in this shot.

I obviously won’t have a working game done in the next 35 minutes, but it was a valiant effort I believe.  What was missing before I would consider this a game:

• Collision detection and response.
• Enemies with some basic pathfinding / AI.
• The main gameplay element: mind controlling the enemy.

Let me do a re-cap on what went right and what didn’t go according to plan:

• The Spartan framework along with Slick2D was great for getting a jump start on the simple stuff.  In a few hours I had a game shell with splash screen, moving player, camera focus, and mouse rotation.
• TilED was great for designing levels.  I had a basic arena map done in a matter of minutes.
• GraphicsGale saved me when GIMP was repeatedly crashing.
• I hadn’t thoroughly used the Spartan framework, so I was unsure how to go about creating new modules for game Entities (Actors).  When it came time to add enemies and pathfinding, I was completely stumped.
• I hadn’t ever used Slick2d’s TilED loader before.  It took me some time to figure out how to use and manipulate the tile map once I had it in my game.
• I hadn’t ever drawn tileset graphics before.  I wasted a bunch of time drawing and redrawing tile graphics to get something usable.  Also GIMP crashed on me quite a few times, ruining my work.

The moral of the story seems to be: know your tools and libraries.  Much time could have been saved if I didn’t need to fumble around with the tool or dig through the API docs.

Maybe next time I will put together something playable!

Tags: journal, screenshot

Sixteen hours and twelve minutes.

Compressed into a timelapse video for your viewing pleasure. Because I wrote a physics engine, procedurally generated characters, and then ran out of time for graphics, it’s not edge-of-the-seat thrilling to watch. But it’s amazing how much time I spend typing code, I’m surprised my fingers haven’t fallen off.

Watch in your browser (firefox/opera). Or download the file.

Don’t forget to use Zombies as Weapons by downloading my game. It’s more fun than this timelapse, I promise.

Looks like I’ll be submitting my entry for the jam and not the competition this time.

But everyone can try out what I would have submitted to the competition! Jump to this link and play the prototype for Cannon Hack.

Well, just submitted my entry but not really too happy with it.

I think I fell into the trap of not having anything playable until very late on. I spent so long developing the gameplay mechanics (that is, trying to get them to *work*) that I didn’t really have time to make the most of the concept. What there is is the shell of an idea that was almost good.

Still, I think there’s plenty to expand on and improve on, and lots I could develop further if I want to. But I think I’ll have a day off from game development tomorrow!

The funny thing is, it didn’t seem like a complicated idea to start with. I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to implement everything, but actually sitting down and doing it became a real slog.

I’m disappointed, but then it wouldn’t be an exciting competition if you knew you would make a decent game every time. Experimenting and trying something new is all part of the fun, and you can’t experiment without the possibility of failing. So at the very least I can say I learned something, although I’m probably too tired to explain what it is!

I had a lovely time at CB2 Indies. Good luck to everyone else who was there, it was great meeting you all! I’ll be sure to return 😉

And good luck to everyone else who’s taken part!

Conga Line

It’s hard to give up after working so hard, but there’s no way to get a working game in 5 minutes from what I have. The Javascript A* I nabbed off the web performs way too slowly (it does a linear search through the arrays storing open and closed nodes). If I just put a moderate blockade in place so the enemies have to path about 5 extra steps out of their way, the A* implementation takes somewhere from 1-2 seconds in firefox. Chrome is better at about .5 seconds, but still not playable. With that big a delay, the enemies overshoot their target tiles and have to backup, creating a nice conga line. Even if I managed to have a decent A*, I still didn’t get zombie infection implemented, so there still isn’t any gameplay.

I may try to get in on the jam, but with work tomorrow that only gives me a couple extra hours.

My game Dr. Stein’s Super Weapons VS Giant Robots is finished (sort of).

Lessons learned:

• Drawing sprites is hard
• Less is more
• Take breaks

Play here

Good night everyone

I made a timelapse of my development cycle.

Watch it here (I guess we cant embed youtube)/

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

Competition Entry
Windows & Source

Uses Allegro 4.4.

Source included, no basecode used.

:V unappreciative duck does not appreciate enemies. Eat them up and spit them back out in projectile form!

This is my first ever entry to Ludum Dare! HypnoFruit is a tower defense game, where your use captured creeps as towers. To use a creep as a tower you must first defeat it, then feed it enough hypnofruit.

I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to, so the graphics are horrible, and there are only 2 barely tested levels. I did manage to get a few sound effects in before I ran out of time. Overall, I had a pretty good experience, without any serious setbacks.

entry page

Tags: hypnofruit game

Got the game finished, complete with enemies that actually shoot. Check it out. I didn’t have quite as much time as I would’ve liked to tune the difficulty curve, but it seems to be close enough to what it ought to be.

Ok, I think my entry is good enough to submit and there’s probably not enough time to make any last minute changes so here it is, the final version of “Killer Knife-Robots from Knife Planet K” (Windows version).

The game is fully playable and there is a high score as an attempt to add some replay value. Instructions and controls are in the Readme.txt file in the zip.

The development process went quite smoothly and there were no major bugs. I did make a whole bunch of little mistakes (especially at the end) but I was able to resolve them quickly. Also my collision detection code  was really slow, but I was able to speed it up by doing bound-box checking before doing the actual checks (which involved a lot of floating-point maths).

I’m quite pleased with my second Ludum Dare entry and look forward to doing another one! Right now I’m hyped up on sugar and caffeine (my sleep substitute) so I’ll probably go for a bike ride or something. See you all next time!

Screenshot of final game

Tags: final, screenshot, update

Join [your name here] on his quest to find his grandfather’s glasses! Battle evil rats/bunnies and turn them into equipment! Discover which items are useless, and which ones actually do something.

This is a puzzle-platformer about experimenting, exploring, and perhaps some trial-and-error dying like oldschool games.

What are you waiting for? Play it now!

I submitted my game to the form with 5 minutes to spare! Phew…

Play it  here in your browser!

My game page here on the Ludum Dare blog.

Tags: avoidal, enemies, final, flash, mines, robot, seekers, spikes

It’s finally done… You can download it from the competition page, or from here.

Should work in most Windows machines, although I only tested it with Windows 7 (64-bit)… But all the code is pretty straightforward, and I’m using old libraries (FMod, for example)…

It might require DirectX 9.0 (Feb. Update), you can get it at Microsoft.

It may also require the Visual Studio redistributables, which you can the 2005 here or the 2008 here. I’ve done the game in VS 2005, but sometimes the 2005 redist don’t work for some reason, so that’s why there are two links…

Hope you like it, any comments are appreciated!

Tools used:

Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32
Graphics: Photoshop CS4 (mostly traced from Oryx’s pack for the TIGSource Assemblee compo), 3d Studio Max 2010 (for title screen)
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter)
Blogging: Zoundry Raven, Internet Explorer
Reading LD: Omea Reader
Listening music: Winamp

I have lots of ideas on how to make the game better, from gameplay logic (less random enemy selection, which would lead to more tactical gameplay) to additions to the gameplay mechanics (more spells, more direct control over the game itself, more unit types)…

Some of them I might add tomorrow at the Jam, if I feel like it (but I doubt it… Spent more time than I though on the competition… after all, I was just going to participate on the Jam!)…

Anyway, I’ll write a postmortem tomorrow (and look forward to reading yours, and playing your games and whatnot!)… At the time of this writing, already 142 Compo entries, and 3 for the Jam… Less than LD17, but more than LD16… And this number might swell afterwards…

So good job everyone, I had a terrific time, think that for the first time I did a game that doesn’t completely suck and looks acceptable…

Catch you all later!