I’ve finished the basic gameplay and and starting to spruce up the graphics and doing fancy shader stuff. I’m planning on doing four different styles. Here’s concept art for three of them: a diagrammatic “lunar” style, a Chuck Close inspired “gas giant style”, and a stylized but somewhat realistic “jungle planet”.

This isn’t just a pure mockup, it’s a screenshot that I photoshopped to look like the shaders and stuff that I have in mind. The game looks pretty similar to the “lunar rocks” right now.

The first theme will be the default, and you’ll be able to unlock the others by playing. It shouldn’t be too hard to unlock all of them.

I’m also juggling some other projects so I’m not sure if this will be released by the end of the October challenge, but I’ll do my best.

The Contrasaurus launch was a big success yesterday, getting onto both the front page of Hacker News and the Programming Reddit. We even got 57 Facebook likes!

We received quite a bit of feedback, some positive, some negative, a lot of it useful. We also received a donation!

Something I wish I had done earlier would be to write down my expectations and try and guess what kinds of feedback we would receive, then compare that to the actual feedback and try and improve my intuition for what players care about. It is all too easy for ones mind to pretend it knew it all along once the evidence is in, so next time I’ll be sure to write down my hypotheses.

Another thing I learned is that not all feedback is equal. Some tells more about the player than the game. There will always be negative feedback and trying to modify the game too much to accommodate it may, in some cases, dilute the experience such that no one really loves it. On the flipside though, be sure that there is actual real positive feedback supporting the tradeoffs you are making. Our main one was that we chose to emphasize “being an awesome dinosaur, crushing your enemies” above “having balanced and tactical gameplay”. That’s not to say that there is no balance or tactics, just that “being an awesome dinosaur” came first in our priorities. In some cases it caused the gameplay to suffer and in an ideal world where we have infinite time the game would be extremely excellent in both regards.

The feedback we received often mirrored that choice. The players for whom “being an awesome dinosaur” was important really loved the experience. The more hardcore players who didn’t care about “being an awesome dinosaur” and wanted more complex and tactical gameplay were often disappointed. Some striking examples:

necromian

The gameplay literally consists of the character holding down the left mouse button and holding the right key. Once you get the jetpack you pretty much can’t die. The level design is non-existant, as every level (that I’ve played so far) is just a flat surface with enemies being constantly spawned on it. Overall, I think that you need to work on this game a lot. Currently, I’d say that it’s too boring, and few people will play it past the third level.

yummyfajitas

I can’t even begin to describe the awesomeness of controlling a jetpack powered dinosaur wielding twin chainsaws while fighting communists all to the midi-encoded tunes of Lady Gaga. The plotline was truly amazing, I totally didn’t see the ending coming.

Another interesting decision was that we chose to go the HTML5 route, rather than using an “established” platform like Flash. I think that, for us, it was the right decision. We don’t have much Flash experience, and if we’ll need to learn a new platform anyway we might as well go for one that appears to be rising rather than one that appears to have plateaued.

There are still tons of problems with HTML5 today, primarily cross browser audio, and crazy nearly impossible to reproduce crash bugs, as well as the standard cross browser web crap. The biggest pain was all the crash reports of running the game in Chrome, even though that’s the environment where for us, in development, it worked nearly perfectly. Additionally it was pretty much unplayable in FF, except on super-powerful computers, had control issues in Opera, only usable in IE via Chrome Tab, and crash reports on any of the browsers were not uncommon. This is the biggest issue right now with HTML5 but it is an issue that is currently being resolved and hopefully quickly.

In the end though the actual technology doesn’t matter at all to the player. The only thing that matters is that they can play the game reliably and enjoy the experience without issues.

Brian Gruening

the best flash game i have EVER seen play it http://contrasaur.us/

Tags: Contrasaurus, html5

I did a little bit of work on the enemy spawn thingy. I ended up screwing up the game.

I’m going to look into it tomorrow night.

I need to speed up the progress i’m making, I’m taking to long to do simple things. I only have maybe a week or two to get it down and submit it to apple. This is why I hate homework.

My October challenge entry is a game for the Windows Phone 7. That means I can’t sell a copy until Windows Phones are available.

At the start of October, Microsoft hadn’t even told us when they were going to tell us when the phones would be released. I was getting anxious.

On Monday, Microsoft announced the launch dates. In the US, the phones come out on November 8th

But in Europe and Asia, the launch date is October 21st. I’ll have nine days to sell a copy. I can still win this!

Well, bad news first: Yesterday, I lost many hours to an old, nasty bug in my EEL scripting engine.

The good news: I cracked the bug! Turned out to be memory corruption due to the VM allocating one byte to few for a “stack” used for memory managing VM register variables. (EEL has an oddball automatic memory management solution, due to it being targeted at realtime applications. Reference counting with a few shortcuts, basically.) This had gone undetected as it only happens when you have a multiple of 16 register variables in a function.

Also, I now have an “Olofson Arcade presents” screen, a title screen with a nice, animated logo, and some nice code to play around with. So, now I can throw some game logic in the mix! I intend to take the Kobo Mk II for a first test flight some time today.

I’ve been caught up the past few days with my game Smiles. Over the past month and a bit, quin and I ported the game to Windows Phone 7.

Aside from that, I finally came up with a name for my October game (which I’ll reveal soon), and had a bit of a business plan revelation too.

Then today ended up being a very weird day. I slept in until 6 PM (accidentally), and woke up to all kinds of good news in my e-mail box. To sort of celebrate, I decided to get some Chinese take-out for breakfast. As customary, it included a fortune cookie.

This accompanied a delicious plate of chicken fried rice (with big chunks of chicken in it)

The question is: who is the money maker? Smiles for WP7, or my October game?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 5:41 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2010. 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.

Moonhelm is an indie game currently being put together by one programmer and one artist focusing on a small tight knit first person survival horror experience that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Ya, that’s a weird mix we know).

Below is a quick sketch of one of the baddies nicknamed ‘The Pig’.

Progress has been a lot slower these past few days.  Sunday I has to do a bunch of stuff in the morning, had many interruptions  and distractions while I could have been working, and had other stuff to do that took a few hours in the evening.  Basically no progress.  Monday after work was pretty much the same, although a little bit of progress was made.  I now have the game connecting to a database, and sending information to it.  This will be used for best times, world records and that sort of tracking.  Tuesday not much progress was made by myself, but the website can now access the database and display a table of the laptimes, sorted to boot!

Today has been a slightly different story.  Progress isn’t blazing, but I have at least added a Message Box state, which will be used to tell the player that they are not connected to the database, and therefore any laptimes performed will not be shared, or rated.  Among many, many other uses.  The other day I didn’t put up screen shots of the main menu, but I will now – despite the same fugly look.

An extremely simple main menu. (*Multiplayer may be cut!)

This is likely what it will remain like for the Alpha build, although perhaps I am wrong.  I know that over the course of development when I come to polish this screen, I plan on it looking something like the next screenshot.  Forgive my concept art skills.  Well actually, forgive the complete lack of any art skills!

My hopes are to have this screen animated, so it looks like the car is moving along.  The plan would likely be just moving the trees and clouds from right to left, while adding a subtle vibration to the car, perhaps tire rotation…  Something simple but active.  Anyways, I’m still trying to refactor and put together some simple UI classes so I can create other screens quickly.  Also, before I go too far I will need to stop and consider localization support for any text that gets built into the game.  It is best to do that sort of thing early, although I am going to attempt finding “universal” symbols/icons, and use those instead of text whenever possible.

I do wish I didn’t have a day job.  It is really holding back my potential progress, and really hurting me as far as my schedule is concerned.  I’m hoping to release something by the end of October, but I am not overly confident it will happen.  But here’s to hoping!

I’m kinda at the point of making a game where you don’t want to do any work.

I’m going to start working on it tomorrow again, after a break of two days. I just really need to fix these bugs.
I’m starting to think about working on a backup project so I have a least one game made by the end of the month, though its quite late now.

-bear

No, really — it is!

Everything that needs to be in the game is so; what’s left is just visual and interface polish. ‘course, both the visuals and the GUI design are in need of some serious polishing.

Anyway: Distant Star now has an awesome technology tree; players (human or AI) can browse the tree and select new technologies to research. Researched techs affect all aspects of the game: ship combat, empire management, exploration, etc — and choosing to research one technology may prevent you from researching others. Choices, choices.

What to choose, what to choose?

Furthermore, the technology system is entirely data-driven; technologies, with their costs, dependencies, and effects, are loaded from XML. Even the tech tree display is automatic; it uses a simple tree layout algorithm to render itself. What this means is that I can step away from the technology system entirely, either outsourcing it to someone else (anybody feel like helping?) or pushing a newer, better tech tree in a post-release update.

More progress after the jump:

I’ve got a few (basic, boring) menu screens built. The only nifty thing about them is the title music, an absolutely perfect unlicensed track I found over on ccMixter. Oh, lovely internet musicians…

It's pretty basic, but not entirely unattractive...

If you’ve played Civ V, this notification system ought to look reeeeal familiar:

If it's good enough for Fireaxis, it's good enough for me!

Tags: screenshot

So I got the blood working for my game ^_____^ However when anything collides, it bleeds which doesn’t make much sense for the boxes.. Guess I’ll go fix that now haha. Stick figures are going to emit blood, and boxes will emit brown wood pieces. Anyways, here’s a video of what I have in action. Well I dunno how to embed youtube videos so just click on the pic to see it haha.

I’ve been through numerous game ideas, and have drifted around back to making a Cube mod.

My idea is inspired by time spent in AssaultCube using a shotgun. They’re such fun weapons that I want to make an FPS where the protagonist only uses a shotgun.

The game’s title is Shotty, which is also the name of the protagonist. The game will feature a handful of different shotguns. The player will have a basic shotgun which can fire either buckshot or an infinite supply of birdshot. There will also be a double-barreled shotgun, an automatic fire shotgun (Sometimes called a “Jackhammer”), and a low-spread shotgun that fires over long range. The bad guys will probably be trolls. Because trolls are ugly and mean, and make good villains.

The game’s setting will be lighthearted, starting in a quaint grassland and moving to a cartoonish Quake-like fortress. I don’t have a plot yet, but I like what I have so far. (Even though I have only vague designs and some slightly edited Cube sources)

I’m still hoping to finish one of these…

— Mr. Dude

I’m a little late to the game, saw the post on Reddit and have been heads-down trying to get a very simple game working for the iPhone using cocos2d by the end of the month.

So I had a quick question for those of us who will be going the app-store approach, any one thinking about going the no marketing approach? Hoping to write a game that will sell itself? Obviously very difficult if you’re making a web-game.

I’m personally writing a simple “distance” game where the player has to make it as far as possible without hitting obstacles. Figured it would be a great way to work with game center for the iPhone; since I’ve never done much with game-kit before. I’m figuring just add achievements and leader-boards. So I think I’m just going to release it as a game-centerable app and see if the new gamecenter area is new and hip enough to gain a sale without doing much in the way of posting to forums, reddit etc. Besides posting here… of course. Whattya think?

I just noticed that I made two “day 4” posts

Today I worked on getting the game to work again, I’ve fixed most the game but I still have to add the spawner. For some reason it didn’t like the variable “screen” equaling 1. I don’t know why this happened.

I’ll get the game to a proper playable point tomorrow and add some small things throughout the week.

Little to no progress since my last post. I’ve had to work all weekend and stayed late working much of the week. No bueno. Still hoping to get something sent to Apple before the 31st, but the outlook is not too good.

So after another week of frenzied coding, my game is totally playable! The level editor is totally working! And I’ve got rough menus all in.

You can see my blog for more posts about the dev process. The main things left are:

- Creating more levels!
- Crazy “social” features!
- Improving graphics!
- Adding music and sound!
- Ports to various platforms (Windows, iPad, others?)

Hopefully it’ll all come together!
-Phil

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 17th, 2010 at 7:47 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2010. 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.

We’ve recently decided that in line with all the other Ludum Dare projects, simply calling our project the ‘Ludum Racer’ would not be in the true spirit of the competition, so we’ve actually thought about names, and have changed the theme slightly.

It’ll now be known as ‘Dwarf Dash’ and will feature Dwarfs on trikes, or similar.

Development-wise, collision detection code is being written (Some technical info on how we’ve used Adobe Illustrator’s SVG format and TouchXML to create the collision mesh here), and we have a project that we can actually run. Time’s tight, but things are looking OK.

No eye candy this time I’m afraid, just boring ol’ text!

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

Not as much visible progress as I would have liked; there is one of those “thanks for playing” exit screens now, and yes, I did make that first test flight mentioned in my last post! Not very interesting at that point, but at least, I could experiment a little with Asteroids style control (rotate + thrust) vs the classic Kobo Deluxe style controls (aim and go in the direction indicated).

Right now, I have a control system that’s much like that of Kobo Deluxe, but the ship is actually driven by physics (ie mass, inertia, forces, acceleration etc), using a set of thrusters for power and control.

The advantage of using actual physics is that I get that nice, smooth, realistic feel, along with actual data to use for rendering the ship and thruster flames. Also, I can very easily have the ship respond sensibly to projectile impact, collisions and whatnot; just apply the forces and let the physics deal with it.

The downside is that “real” physics demands real control engineering! Typical naïve methods will only have the ship wobble uncontrollably, just as it would in real life. Fortunately, I’ve spent some 12 years doing control engineering for a living, so I can probably figure that part out. 😉

Oh, the ship has cannons too! 😀 Two sets even; one that’s much like the forward cannon from the old Kobo Mk I (the ship in Kobo Deluxe, that is), and one that spews out a massive, cool (er, I mean hot…) looking stream of… lava or something. The latter was just the result of my initial experiments, but it might show up somewhere, in some form.

I’m thinking of dropping the tail cannon of Kobo Mk I, and use two weapons instead; a primary nose cannon and secondary tail mounted device that drops a bunch of small bombs or similar. The latter would be mostly a defensive weapon, to get enemies off your tail. I’ll play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t – but first, I need some enemies…!

Howdy,

I’m sadly probably going to have to drop out of the october challenge, at the start of the month I went to a conference then I released a new iPad game on the 12th and it’s been in need of some serious, serious polishing which has eaten up most of my time..

if i need get some days free before the end of the month free I may be able to finish the LD game, but it would be really unpolished and I don’t feel so hot about releasing another unpolished game

if your interested in what i’ve finished so far check out my dev blog @

at tumblr there I have a video of the first iteration of the my LD game

Anthony

I’m almost done with the Iphone version of my game Explosive Love and I’ll post some gameplay videos one of the coming days. Here is a short non-public intro short video from the game. You can find an almost up to date webbuild of the game here: http://garbos.itu.dk/explosivelove/game.html Feedback is  appreciated 😀

I didn’t succeed in embedding the youtube video, but you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBklbC3bToo

Explosive Love intro video