well, since this minild so closely aligns to the kind or game I’ve been working on lately (including the last full ludumdare), I’ve just got to give it a go.

I think I have a terrific idea for a dialogue based zombie thriller. It will be another chance to use all my audio equipment.

Basically you make contact over cb radio with a man in a neighboring city which is under seige from zombies. You have to use your general knowledge of zombies from books and movies to help the man make the right decisions so he can rescue his girlfriend and escape town.

It will be a first person affair in which you listen to him describe his situation and then you choose from a dialog tree on what to say to help him. In some cases you might lead him right to his demise.

To improve on my last game, the audio clips will be shorter. No more than a paragraph or two and there will be more interaction.

Let’s see how it goes!

As the this weekend approaches rapidly we’ve been really working on our game.  I’ve included a link to our new demo. We’ve added a ton of features, god powers, updated graphics, sound effects, and much more!

Play it now!  http://shard123games.weebly.com/

Well I’ve gotten nowhere on the mini LD.  It’s been a pretty crazy couple of weeks.  I’ve had a multiplicity of things taking up my time in the evenings, some of that work bleeding over after 5pm.  And today a recurring eye injury cropped up again, forcing me to stay home from work, meaning I’ll be doing even more in the evenings.  I have a concept and a good codebase, but that’s it.  Seeing as the project is much too ambitious for just a weekend, I doubt I’ll have anything very presentable for the deadline.

On a brighter note, the get-together that I was planning actually happened!  Last Saturday a number of us met at a friends house and hung out and discussed our ideas.  I believe it was a profitable time, and it was definitely fun.  Although many of them won’t be joining this LD, we all shared projects that we wanted to work on and generally had a good time talking about game coding.  Some new ideas developed out of the mix.  We’ll be doing it again this coming Saturday, just in time to wrap up for the mini LD.

Fat Farming Girl is now playable! It has lots of bugs, but I wanted to get some early feedback before submitting it for the competition:

Direct Download

Tags: fat farming girl

Ren'Py rocks.

The author of Ren’Py (the best visual novel engine and the tool I recommend most enthusiastically for this weekend’s miniLD #27) has expressed support for Ludum Dare!  He is frantically working on bugfixes for a fresh new version of Ren’Py for you all to enjoy this weekend.

Be sure to check it out: this is a master work and a labour of love that has been constantly updated for over two years. http://www.renpy.org/why.html

I warmly encourage everyone to follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/renpytom

Tags: Ren'Py

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 8:10 am and is filed under MiniLD #27. 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 been a long time observer of these Ludum Dare contests but have always happened upon them right as they are over.  This will be my first entry!

I am not comfortable doing an art and dialog-heavy RPG, so for the theme of “All Talk” I have decided to take a platformer and smash it down into a game about talking.  The idea is that instead of directly controlling a platformer character, you talk to one and convince it to do what you want.

The idea has evolved into a herding game of sorts.  You are character who is trying to convince all of the little peons to go to the right side of the screen.  There is apparently some great danger on the left side of the screen.  You are opposed by an adversary who is trying to convince all the peons to go to the left side of the screen where he is either trying to eat them or capture them or something like that.

So you are a single platformer character controlled with WASD, and when you are colliding with a peon, you can talk to it to convince it to either walk left, right, or jump by using the arrow keys.  If a peon is doing something you tell it to and collides with another peon, it will try to convince the other peon to do the same thing.  So everyone is talking to each other.  All Talk you might say.

To make it more interesting, each peon will have a rank (and probably some other attributes) that determine whether or not it succeeds in persuading.  The game will basically be an action game to see who can herd the peons to their side fastest.  I might even try to squeeze in a multiplayer where one player herds to the left and other to the right.

I am a big fan of Reddit rage comics, so all of the peons are various rage faces.

I am writing it in Javascript with the HTML5 canvas.  I have been needing to learn Javascript better for a long time and this gives me an opportunity to check out the new features of HTML5.  So far I am very impressed and am excited about the possibility to make browser games without any plugins at all.

Hopefully I get this done in time!

The game will live at least for now at http://lifelessboring.com/minild27 so give it a play if you are interested.  I will try to keep at least moderately playable versions on the live site.

For this miniLD I plan to program an RPG-style NPC dialogue system for my touch-screen Android phone as well as web and windows executable.

I already have a very basic proof-of-concept running on all three platforms.

For the art, I’ve prepared several Poser 2010 characters that I can render with various facial expressions.

I have a fighter, a cleric, a retired army general and a wise old alchemist, along with their “familiars” (magical talking animals).  You can see a screenshot of the cast in a previous post.

I think the animals will be more entertaining than the people, so the story will be seen from the perspective of a sarcastic orange shorthair exotic cat named Prince Charlemainge Powerpaws III (prince Charlie for short).

Tools:
– written in HTML and javascript
– windows .exe is just a wrapper for a xulrunner chromeless web browser
– web version is naturally just the HTML file itself
– android version is built using Phonegap (with a WebKit window)

Wish me luck!

Tags: screenshot

The last time I tried to participate in a Ludum Dare was like a year ago. Unfortunately a relative(not a close one) died and I had to be there to support my family, so I didn’t finish a thing. Anyways, this time I’m planing to make it to the very end >:D. I’ll be using as3/flixel, Paint.NET and milkytracker. I’m not sure about the last one, but if nothing works out I’ll use some samples. I don’t have anything planed so I’ll be writing some code for the dialogs. I think I can work something out…

Yes, we’re finally finished! You can check out our game, the Struggle for Humanity under all entries for the MiniLD. Hope you enjoy it!

Well, over the past few weeks I’ve worked a little on an engine to use for this mini ld. There are still bugs, but I made a little example program with the thing to hopefully help motivate you to enter the mini ld.

Without further ado, here it is, a little sample of what my engine can do.

EDIT: Here’s an updated version!

Hope you enjoy it!

(I’m the31 in IRC, by the way.)

Well, for this MiniLD, my intention is to create a working dialogue engine and a working pseudo-3D overworld engine… in GM Lite! The story will probably involve schoolgirls killing zombies and monsters. From what I have done building base code while waiting for the LD to actually start, I have gotten a Ren’Py engine somewhat working, though it’s a bit disorganized and I have not yet gotten questions finished. I want there to be multiple endings that depend on the path you choose, and yes, shipping will be involved because I ship everything. (Linkxfloor FTW), and so for the engine I built a choose-your-own-adventure type story redirection system. It actually was really easy to do that, especially with how computers work rather than books. Anyway, I’ll will prolly post screens, but don’t be surprised if I don’t (I’m not good at doing stuff like that). At the end, however, I *will* post a time lapse, along with the finished blank dialogue engine and the game.

Fenyx

Howdy! Looking forward to putting as much time as I can this weekend into a small game I’m working with Ren’Py, which is a first for me but it looks great. I think I’ll also be using the Dating Sim Engine framework, though the game definitely won’t be about dating or romance. My girlfriend has been playing a game that uses those dating sim mechanics (Matches & Matrimony) and they look like they could be a lot of fun in another kind of story as well.

I have a couple of story ideas, so I’m going to spend the rest of this evening sketching & see which one sticks first!

After some conversation in the IRC channel (go there if you aren’t already there), I’m working on a simple game where you fly through a cave and avoid blowing yourself up…. but you control your ‘ship’ by changing the frequency of your voice.  Really it’s just a pink block right now but it will be cooler,  I hope, pitch control proof of concept is complete, just need to make the whole game part, minor detail:

I’m starting my miniLD entry for the All Talk theme. I’m going to be using C++ with SFML and Code::Blocks as my IDE to create a text-based conversation game. The game will give you some text from a person talking about you will be given some options to reply with. Each different option will branch to another option, so the game will be a full conversation with lots of replayability for different scenarios and endings. I only have a very vague idea for the storyline, but I think it will develop as I write each part.

I’m starting the engine right now. I don’t think it will be very tough. The main work will come from writing and linking all the conversation pieces together.

I hope to learn how to effectively distribute my C++ games with SFML for multiple platforms – but starting with Windows, since this is the first time I will be making a game in C++, let alone using SFML. I typically use MMF2.

Just most of the code so far. It’s small and simple and it works

The more difficult part of the code is actually displaying it without using console! That’s where SFML comes in.

I wasnt shure about entering but after reading the secret phrase yesterday, I woke up this moring with an idea aching to be implemented.

the game is pretty simple you go into a tmple where 3 wise men are waiting to answer your questions and when yousay the right thing you can fill in their role to answer questions yourself, the game will run online of course and so with every game the 3 wisemen hopefully become mroe wise as they have more questions and answers to tap from..

what do you think?

I’m going to use node.js and nodester for the server and html5 canvas for the game interface hope I get everything done in the weekend.

I finally managed to progress with my game. Although there isn’t much to see in this screen right now i am focusing on code, and then art more.

Game will be in 800×600 resolution with windowed and fullscreen option. Feedback? Comments? Critics? You are welcome.

Tags: ld48, progress, screenshot

Be aware. “Unknown” is sending his forces, computer viruses that are trying to vanish you. More about my MiniLD #27 game, you can read here. I am making progress with code, and also today I’ve done a lot of art. So here is my screenshot 3. Comments?

Tags: 2d platform, ld48, MiniLD #27, progress, screenshot

I’m working on a visual novel about a person who wakes up to find the world empty. It’s one of those old scifi trope premises (like The Quiet Earth, for example) — but this won’t be science fiction in that it won’t preoccupy itself at all with the “how.” Instead it’s a story about the more mundane experiences this person has in an empty world.

For the backgrounds, I’m using creative-commons photos from Flickr, with some cropping & other adjustments.

I’m using the Dating Sim Engine from Ren’py, so it has this day planner interface. Depending on what you choose for the character to do each day, a few invisible stats are tweaked. The stats have a few different impacts: they affect the character’s dreams, determine which ending you see, and some activities have special events that only occur when you do them with certain stats at certain levels. So hopefully that adds some dynamism to the story!

I’m going to take a break from coding now to work on some music, and then I have a bunch of writing to do before tomorrow

Just woke up, Sunday here 10AM (Australia). I worked out the storyline for my game while lying in bed this mornin, debating whether or not to get up. I’d let you know it now but it would spoil the game. I think it’s pretty cool and will allow a few different places for branching the story in different directions. The secret phrase: “I think we can work something out…” actually fits in perfectly as well and I’d totally forgotten about it. So that’s good to know.

Here’s my plan of attack:
1. Finish dialog engine to display text and allow you to choose an option. (Problem: I don’t know how to wrap text with SFML.)
2. Build the dialog/game!