We’ve used this months Ludum Dare to amp up production and set a goal for creating a demo of our upcoming game. An action adventure game similar to Legend of Zelda, let us know what you think.

Blossom Tales

• Check out a video of the game in action, Blossom Tales: Gameplay Video
• Download the Game. You will also need the Xna 3.1 Redistributable download here
• If you need help checkout our website.

Cheers.

Five-O is a board game I’ve been developing in my spare time over the last few years. It started as a side project during college. I was taking a course in artificial intelligence, and I wanted to create a game with an AI component. Growing up, I had played one of the many “Scrabble-but-with-numbers” games and had fond memories of it. Searching the internet revealed not a single good implementation of this idea for the computer, so that’s what I set out to make.

The basic rules are as follows. Players take turns placing intersecting sequences of numbers on a board. Each sequence must total to five or a multiple of five, and no sequences may be more than five tiles in length. For example, 7-3-8-7 would be a valid sequence because it adds up to 25. The sequence 3-9-5 is not valid because it adds up to 17 which is not a multiple of five. You can read more on the game’s webpage.

With the release of the iPad, I put the desktop version of Five-O on hold and started focusing on getting an iPad version done. The device is just too perfect for board games like Five-O. The October Challenge was the push I needed to finally finish version 1.0 and publish it in the App Store.

Tags: board game, Five-O, iPad

I’ve put up what I got. I’m not exactly proud of it as a whole. And, it probably deliverers just short of $1.26 of fun, but it is what it is.

Part of me wants to make it better, but another part of me is done with the idea and wants to move on!

Compo Link: Stacker
Website Link: Stacker

PS I’d lower the price, but BMT Micro has $1.25 minimum

Update: I switched to FastSpring and was able to lower the price to a dollar!

Tags: screenshot

I finished Five-O on October 21st and submitted it to the App Store for approval that night. As the days went by, I started to get worried that it wouldn’t be approved in time, but on Friday, October 29th, I received confirmation that the game was approved for sale. I got my first sales on October 30th! Woohoo!

View Five-O in the App Store

Tags: board game, Five-O, iPad

My game, Endeavor, has been getting some great feedback and is nearly done!

I’m holding off on releasing it to give it some extra polish. The game will be free to play, though I’m not yet sure what site it will be published on.

I’m glad to have participated in the challenge, even though I won’t be submitting it on time, and haven’t earned anything *yet*! I will post here when it is finished and released.

Congratulations to everyone who completed the challenge!

Basically I added some sounds (and some description to each level), and called it done, I then proceeded to create a games page and add it to IndieFlux my game review website.

So hopefully that will drive traffic to IndieFlux and then maybe earn some views which will in turn get me some adds from project wonderful. I don’t know if I’ll make any money with this game, it’s probably kind of lame, but still it was fun to essentially complete my 4th game (that was actually of my own design and coding).

I’m going to continue to work on the game though, and when I have polished it enough, I might take it down and put it on FlashGamesLicense — I sort of doubt I will get a sponsor though.

To play the full size version go here –
Ballsy! Challenge Version

I submitted my game to Apple. Have a look at the submission post here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2010/?action=preview&uid=531

I sadly couldn’t finish the game in time, I couldn’t fix the sound.

I’m still going to work on space waves, It could be quite a fun game if its properly done. I wish I’d known a bit more about OF with the iPhone before I started.

Anyway congrats everybody for making some really good games, they all look great fun! I need to try them all out!

I had a lot of fun doing this,  it was something I’d want to do again.

P.S can’t wait for the mini LD this month!

-bear

Okay, so I did not quite get where I wanted to this October, but it would have been a challenge even if my freetime would have been higher.  Work related stuff ended up taking a lot of my time, for almost 10 days in a row I was unable to make much progress at all, then work started slowing down, but I had an opportunity for a programming test; which ultimately failed as I found out last night.

These are not excuses, as much as the truth of why I didn’t get where I wanted.  I am actually quite far behind schedule now, although I am still holding high hopes that I can sell a copy by December 31st.  I see more and more people are starting to become interested, as I released a video of the game in replay mode last week, and have had a few instant messages with congratulations and stuff.

Overall I still feel positive about the project, and even after a few weeks of “here and there” development I think things are coming together nicely.  I still need to edit the physics of the car/world, and need work on the user interface of the game.  One small piece of the gameplay portion exists before I start adding all the dressing and polish that will turn it from a ‘game’ into something playable.

Tonight I added a config file, so the player can change settings and they will remain stored for the next time they play.  As soon as I finish writing this I will start working on resources for the car, so that tires can be depleted, fuel runs out over time and brakes heat up, performing worse under heavy use, although quickly cooling back off.  Once I get that working I will need to add some more things to the track editor, and start making some tracks and content…  We will see.

In other news I added music, for now it is just temporary although I am going to be getting in contact with a musician sometime (I hope).

Have a good time, and congratulations to all those in the community that finished their games in October!!!

After announcing Astriarch – Ruler of the Stars as public beta a few weeks ago, I’ve finally passed the $1 in ad revenue mark!

Thanks for holding the October Challenge Ludum Dare, helped give me motivation to finish this off in a hurry!

As far as game design and visible progress goes, things have been moving slowly the last few days, but here’s another update – and an in-game screenshot!

I’ve been working a bit on the sound engine, but mostly cleaning things up and fixing some minor cleanup exit bugs. However, I figured it was time for a screenshot, so I threw in a screenshot feature.

Full story.

In some respects this is a major milestone, in that I’ve added the robots back in. They don’t fire yet, but perhaps it’s just as well as it’s quite difficult to hit them. I can see that I’m going to have to tune the game a lot to make it playable on a phone.

Android download available here, or by scanning the QR code (below).

So, I didn’t take part to this october challenge because I didn’t get my own paypal up in time, and also because Multimedia Fusion’s porting capabilities are really limited and I really wanted to make a flash game. Anyway, a couple days before the challenge ended, I ported an old game of mine called Bulletsss to flash and submitted it to Kongregate to see just how teensy amounts of money one gets if he doesn’t include any exclusivity requests/advertisement APIs with it.

To be honest, I assumed myself that it wouldn’t make any money at all, what with there not being any advertisements to get revenue from. However, as I submitted the game, I noticed that my earlier flash game, Doooors (which was made on my earlier LD entry!), had made some 50 $, of which I got about 12 $. Not much, but it gave me hope that I could perhaps pass the required bottom limit of the challenge, albeit ‘unofficially’.

No luck with that, though. As we speak, Bulletsss has been out there for about a week and the full revenue has been about 0,60 $. Haha, next time I’ll look at Flash games license instead!

If you’re interested (and want to increase my revenue, MWA HA HA HA) go check the game out!
HEREHEREHERRRE

Sorry for this double post, but I thought some people might be interested in this (who am I lying to?) My Ludum Dare 16 entry, called Apocalypse Adventure, did quite well, probably not because of the quality but instead because of the sheer size – 12 different areas and lots of stuff to find. I kinda aimed for that – the game engine is utterly simplistic but it’s compensated by other things. Didn’t work, though, the game was way too confusing and hard, what with lacking a save feature. However, I’m now kinda working on a ‘sequel’, or a game with a similar premise, and I thought it’d be cool to record nice videos of the original to show a bit what’s there. So here they are, dunno if anyone’s interested:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

This is basically my framework from last time, with a few extra things added in from LD18. I spent some time during the competition re-inventing the wheel, and this time around I will be starting out with the following things pre-built;

• Crude animation system. This is the animation system I invented for LD18 with anything remotely game specific removed. It supports an idle loop, temporarily “hitting” an animation so that when its done, it returns to the previous one; “terminating” on a given animation; that animation will run once and then the sprite will *not* return to its idle animation; andthis animation cannot be interrupted by any hits. This is useful, for example, with a death animation, which cannot be interrupted and is the final state.
• Sprite Factory. A sprite is a set of animations; each animation has its own texture (although there’s no reason they cant share) but the sprite factory will instance a sprite for me. I may use XML for the sprites this time around, but last time, I just hard coded the prototypes for the factory (its that kind of factory) in the factory’s ctor.
• My basic “lazy loading” resource table. The purpose of this class is to allow me to lazy load a resource by name and then grab an integer ID for it; no need for fancy streaming or additional threads, each resource to be loaded is loaded directly from disk, resulting in a blocking wait. I wont have the time to be messing with streaming files.
• Crude pathfinding. Given a current square, and a destination square, this will decide what move the creature of object should move to next. There is no “creature” class as I don’t know if the game will even have creatures, so I’ll need to modify this when the competition starts.
• Crude 2D Renderer. This has features such as “draw square” and “draw text”. I wasted time deciding how this should work in LD18; I should be able to dive right into gameplay this time around.

It also has the features of my previous starting framework;

• Texture, and shader loading each into class Texture and class Shader. I never bothered with shaders last time; I may not this time, although its possible that I will have the time this time around.
• Crude wrapper around fmod for playing sounds.
• Windowing, keyboard and mouse input from SDL
• Image loading (into textures) using SOIL

Here is a download link for anybody to use it; I cant see this hackish, undocumented and incomplete code being commercially viable, but don’t use it for anything commercial please. Thanks.

LD19 starting framework

Library: pyGame
Graphics: Paint.NET
Sound Effects: sfxr
BG Music: Yet to decide.

So yeah that’s my things for LD #19, looking forward to it 😀

‘Ello
Noticing the number o LD#18 meetups that were occurring, i thought it would be an idea to see if anyone around where I live wanted to do the same.
I’m in Sydney, Australia, so if any of you live around Sydney, and are interested in a meetup, chuck a comment up, and we’ll probably be able to sort out a nice central location.
Also, you can contact me on:
info.clockworkgames(at)gmail.com

Started off as a ragdoll simulator, and eventually made its way to a canabalt-like game with trains. haha. Anyways, didn’t make it in time for the deadline, didn’t have enough time >_____< I’ll keep working on it though, keep up with my progress on my blog haha. http://justaprototype.com/

Anyone interested in a meeting up for LD19 in the DC or Northern Virginia Metro area?

The November MiniLD will be happening on the weekend of the 26th.  I’m announcing the rules now so that you have some time to think about what you would like to do.

The concept is Unfinished Business.

On the 26th, write a journal entry about a game that you created in the past, preferably a previous LD48 entry.  In the journal entry link to a build of the game in it’s current state, talk about where the game is at, and where you would like it to be.

Then, over the weekend do as much as you can to improve on your old game.  Submit your improved game after 48 hours, and be sure to link back to your opening journal entry in your submission.

The regular LD48 restrictions are relaxed for this MiniLD.  Do whatever you can to make your game as awesome as possible, as long as you still have the legal right to redistribute the game. (no copyright infringement allowed)

To submit:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-22/

To view all submissions:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-22/?action=preview