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!