October Challenge, complete!

Hey, Ludum Dare — my October Challenge entry, Distant Star, is finally out! It’s an old-school 4x space game, something like a mash-up between Master of Orion and pre-expansion Sword of the Stars, re-designed from scratch for the iPad. Give it a try!

Distant Star for iPad, on the Apple App Store.

On a slightly more sober (hic) note: if you play the game I’d really, really appreciate it if you left a review in iTunes.

Tags: final, screenshot

I had that game development itch. And with the next ludum dare over a month away, I decided to make a game this weekend to scratch it.

There’s been this little exercise in my head for a while now: how many people could play the same game on the same PC using 4 keys each on the same keyboard?

Theoretically it would be in the mid-twenties (~100 keys / 4), but that isn’t a practical solution. So ive settled with Five (cramped) players.

“Dude, give me that parachute!” is a physics-based game of tag set 15,000 feet in the air. Five Dudes, one parachute. The Dude with the ‘chute at the end of the game wins. There’s also obstacles and stuff. Still fun with < 5 people, any left over Dudes will just float about randomly.

PLAY!

Pic (looks better in motion):

I’ll be back for LD19!!

-DBS

The game is edging closer to completion. I’d now say that the game itself is done, bar any tuning of the difficulty and the controls. There are still things to do, such as giving it a visible score and giving it a persistent score, but other than that it works reasonably well.

If you want to give it a whirl then you can download it by scanning the QR code from your Android phone. Note that it needs Android 2.1 or better.

I’d be happy with any feedback that you want to give me, so if you would like to leave some then please do so on this site, or here.

Well, this is my first post, so, ‘Hello, everybody!’ I finally decided to actually participate in LD instead of just watch it and I’ve been getting myself ready for it.

Here’s what I have so far:

• I’m going to give HTML5 canvas a shot, since I wanted to use this LD to learn something new, but know enough javascript that it’s not a crazy risk (probably).
• I think I’ve finally settled on using the NetBeans IDE after having tried a bunch of other stuff. It’s not really meant for simple HTML and javascript, but you can sort of trick it into working. It’s auto-complete and syntax highlighting are great!
• I’m building out some basic javascript support libraries. So far I have basic input handling, sprite preloading, ticking and simple drawing.
• I tried to set up a basic schedule. I think reasonably I can expect to work 10 hours a day, since I’m not a college student anymore. An hour or two for design, 8 hours of engine and mechanics, 5 hours of feature completeness, 5 hours of bug fixing and polish. I’ll be curious to see how fast this dissolves into ‘just go as fast as you can’.
• I ordered a fancy pants ergonomic keyboard. I just can’t spend hours typing on those standard things without my hands falling apart, so this ought to help me even physically make it to the finish line.

My background is programming, so I’m a bit worried about the art. I’ve watched a lot of the time lapse and seen plenty of folks spend hours and hours on the art and end up short on the code. I think I’ll probably have the opposite problem.

I wonder what percentage of first timers actually manage to finish…

Woo hoo!  I had my first sale today!!!

Stacker - Bumps on a Log

I’m not… A huge fan of the Mini-LD theme this time around. Still, I guess I can do something with it.

I’m likely going to work on something that I haven’t actually worked on but have been meaning to for quite a long time. I’m not sure what it will actually be, but that’s my basic premise.

I’m thinking that since Fedora (Which I recently switched to) has SDL development stuffs for MingW, I’ll be using C++ and SDL for my game. I’m going to be using Inkscape for graphics as per usual and as3sfxr for sound. I’m pretty sure I won’t have time for music, though.

I have a few ideas in mind for my game (Likely a shmup, I’ve got several that I’ve wanted to make for quite some time), but again, nothing definite yet.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude