Text with text wrapping is now working! I solved my major problem in writing this engine. I had to split the string to render by whitespace, and then insert linebreaks when the length of the words was greater than the screenwidth.

Threads that helped:

Now to generalise the splitting code so that I can also use it on the player’s response choices.

So I have a really basic game, you can speed it up, make the cavern tighter, looser, more varied etc.  There’s a ghost drawn of your ‘ship’ of where the pitch is bringing you to.  There’s a frequency graph on the left, your selected frequency range is shown in blue.

Sorry… My ability, time, and maximum stress level fell far short of where I expected… so no little school girls killing zombies with dialogue… I simply have far too much to do tomorrow and during today, I was unable to work due to unexpectedly changing bedrooms and having to get my stuff out of my old room and into my new one… That took a good… ah… 15 hours considering all of my junk, my brothers’ junk, and my sister’s junk. Also, RISK is extremely distracting, but that’s my own fault.

However, I do have a decent framework for an engine, a timelapse, and a picture of one of the characters… The important thing is that I got a basic framework piece done that I really needed, the dialogue system. Along with the smoooooooth 8-directional movement from another side project of mine, I could prolly pull it off, just not this weekend. I’ll post what I have, but it’s not going to be entered as a MiniLD game. I’ll probably end up using pieces of this, like I do with everything, in a single major project.

I will make sure to do better on the actual LD48-21 in August.

Timelapse: http://adf.ly/1v8dB
What I have so far: http://adf.ly/1v8el
Character picture: http://adf.ly/1v8gF

My engine works! It’s not pretty. But it works. The code isn’t great, but I’ve learnt a fair few things about programming in C++ and using SFML – seeing as though this is my first game in C++.

There are a lot of things that are quite hard to do that I take for granted in my other game development tools. Things such as getting a nice GUI and even organising screens/menus is quite a hassle. I’ve learnt that I’ll need to plan the classes and architecture better for my next game. I find it quite straight forward to do game logic, but actually displaying it I find a bit annoying!

I’m going to do all the story writing now and then I’ll probably release a first version.

This weekend’s miniLD will be officially over at Midnight tonight.  That said, there would be no problem if you post an entry a few hours late.  We will close the submission form on Monday around lunchtime.

Remember: you do NOT have to finish your game – we warmly welcome all submissions including failed projects.  Post whatever you have – just for fun – bugs and all!  Ludum Dare is great for learning new things and the short 48 hours format doesn’t leave time for polish.  A simple prototype, demo or even just a title screen is still an accomplishment.  =)  We don’t mind a few rough edges.

Good luck finishing your games today!  Enjoy the process and don’t stress about the final product.  Whatever you end up with, even if it is a broken piece of junk is worthy of submission.  We promise to be kind with our comments!

Tags: motivation, spreadingthelove, youcandoit

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2011 at 8:19 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.

Well, this weekend… Ahh… Nothing worked. 😀

But, anyways here is an extremely boring game which is actually my first ever Flashpunk game. 😀

No release yet, though, only a screenie.

Yay! Messed up game.

Homing rockets, extremely hard boss, shopping, inter galactical routes, and so on.

[in]Sanity is finished, and you can see it here: Play!

Well, we had to cut most of the game because our artist had to leave early, but it’s still playable and have multiple endings (most of them are death…).

My game turned out to be not really fun, and not how I would have liked it to have played. Here are the reasons it is bad:

Oh Crap!!! I forgot I have to be GM this weekend. With this new (6 or 7 hours less) time constraint wrapping up my game seems even harder. I’m definitely using that extra time. Anyways, here’s a screenshot:

The game is supposed to be named Inside(where most of the talk is going on) and is some sort of exploration game where you can see every though of the main character (a pretty thoughtful guy), ramble around and there are some minigames where you can do stuff. Displaying the thought balloons(in the right direction, place and size), in a way that looks nice, has been proved harder than expected, I’m probably changing the way I display dialogs…

Evening, LDers (Is that a thing?). I’m Zed, I’ve never entered Ludum Dare before so I figured this ‘mini’ one was as good a time as any, and this is my entry, ‘Adventures in the Public Domain‘.

It’s a nice simple Visual Novel, using an engine I created in Clickteam’s Multimedia Fusion 2. The controls are pretty basic (in fact, they’re on the title screen), so feel free to just jump in and get on with it.

The reason for the title is that all of the presentational resources within the game (graphics and music) have been sourced from the public domain, then minimally edited to make them fit with each other. Had I needed to do everything from scratch, the game would probably never get finished, because my art skills are abysmal.

There are three distinct paths through the game (featuring zombies, aliens and… kissing a dog), all of which take you to a single choice, which will then determine your ending. It’s not very complex, but I think it’s worth playing through a few times in order to see everything. I happen to be a fan of the dialogue. But then I would be; I wrote it.

You can play Adventures in the Public Domain on Gamejolt, here

Due to various reasons, most prominently an eye injury, I have to withdraw from this LD.  I currently have nothing even started so it’s pretty far fetched to hope to submit anything now!  Until next time folks!  I may try to enter July’s mini if the topic is released early enough, but August’s LD sees me going back to school and moving into the dorm so that’s probably not an option.  Best of luck everyone!

Im mentally exaust.

Today I had to learn how to use a program and write a lot in english (im still learning).

I always wanted to make my own interactive fiction and I thought in this LD as the perfect oportunity to start with one. I know that the final product of what I did is really far for being a game; but even if the plot was improvised, I really like the idea of cotinue it in the future.

The renpy is great, I think it is a great tool for those of us who don’t know anything about programming. Im going to keep learning how to use it.

Try my entry for this MiniLD!

I’ve polished up what I had, though it’s exceptionally short. I found tarting up the background an excellent displacement activity to avoid actually writing content. Play “White Flag” here.

I’ll let it rest a few days, then add to it. The dialogue system was intended to have internal variables, but I ran out of time – only managed to spend about 12 hours total on this, much of which was learning Stencyl and ActionScript. It’s been good fun though, and I’ve got a good solid template to build a more advanced system on…

Tags: as3, dialogue, flash, stencyl, unfinished

* Update: Monday 27th June (morning) – Lots of bug fixes. Should be a little easier to make it through to the ‘end’. Still no sign of grenades yet, though.

What better way to get into all this than a certain MiniLD #27, where the pressure isn’t too great and the theme is more fun than a fridge full of monkeys? This is my first hack at interactive fiction – I’m using Inform 7, for the first time, and it has taken me longer than I thought to figure out how it all works. Loving it, though!

Since around 9 on Saturday night, I’ve been badgering (badgering; to badger; do badgerific things) on a text adventure. I kind of strayed from the dialog centered chocolate experience, but there’s definitely dialog sprinkled around (like, say, nuts) so it should be a nice snack at the very least. Mmm. Snack.

It’s getting to the point where I don’t think that I’m going to finish this in time, so I’m posting up a link now just to be sure to get something in before the deadline…

My game is a remake of the first Call of Duty game in the format of a text adventure / interactive fiction piece. In 48 hours, given the fact that I’ve never used Inform before, I think I was dreamin’.

I call this – “Text of Duty”

I expect a cease and desist to be in the mail by the end of the week, of course, or at least the distribution of some legal penguins to the pool – that’s the way things go these days, isn’t it? Well, so be it. That’s the kind of rock n’ roll we crazies like to mosh to.

All the best to the other MiniLD’ers!

Keep up the fantastic work

Link-tastic:
http://psychicparrotgames.com/TOD/play.html



So I didn’t finish, but I do have the lion’s share of the structure in what I’ve managed to get done in two days. Turns out it takes longer to find and clean engravings than one might suspect. Anyway, you can see my entry for the contest here.

And rest assured I’ll be finishing this up. I can’t say exactly when, but inside this week seems like a safe bet.

It’s also worth noting that mine was the twenty-third submission to this miniLD… Ψ

My time was fairly limited this weekend: between a distant wedding, birthday BBQ, and soccer practice, but fortunately I managed to find just enough time to participate in MiniLD27!  Choose words from a word find to progress through the dialog and story of Crosswind.  I had a bit more planned for the story than I had time to write, but feel this is a good start and really look forward to the feedback and comments of others.  I’m also looking forward to finding time to play through the other exciting submissions.  Thanks to everyone involved in making MiniLD27!  ENTRY LINK HERE

I scaled back some of the dynamism of the story, so it’s pretty linear, but there are still 3 different endings to see depending on your choices during the game.

Play ‘Last Tuesday’ here!

Ren’py is great! Glad to have learned a bit about that tool. I posted my source code on github as well, tho it’s probably a bit naive since this is my first time using Ren’py.

This LD was a really good experience for me. It’s the first one I’ve done & I’m glad I had a framework like Ren’py to use so that I ended up focusing on it more as a short-term writing challenge than a coding challenge. There were several moments in which I wanted to discard the story I had in order to pursue some new story that occurred to me & seemed more interesting in the moment but, because of the time limit, I had to just keep going on the track I had chosen. So that was an interesting constraint — I hope it made for an interesting game!

I’m aware it’s not the best etiquette to not show something even if it’s unfinished, but hear me out.

I planned the entry to be based on my fully-fledged game as a prequel — perhaps to introduce would-be players to the universe of SoL and as such title it SoL: Plutocracy, where you play a dirty space pirate/merchant/hippy in the early years of Stardrive travel, before the war with the Stygians broke out and when Earth was still mostly a hegemonic plutocracy.  “Yes,” I thought, “that is brilliant!  The story meshes so well and considering the topic IS story-based, it’d be perfect.”

However, after building the game itself, I realised one thing: designing something entirely around dialogue in a game mostly derived from action is kinda difficult.  I wanted the meta-gameplay to be at least moderately fun or act as a diversion, but this would’ve taken longer than the 48 hours given.  I quickly realised all I had was really just graphical eye candy.  I can’t have that.

Regardless, I found this thoroughly interesting and challenging to give myself such constraints, as the last time I did a timed game challenge was well over a decade ago in the ZZT/Megazeux days (which a very select number of you might remember).

But I won’t leave you with nothing.  Here are a couple of screenshots:

The planets were textured with a Perlin noise generator that my team and I developed for SoL.  Almost all the graphics you see was procedurally generated.

Me and Eddie Cameron did a game based on Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” I did art / design, and Eddie did code / design.

We got done with about 80% of it. We have a pretty good skeleton, but the gameplay needs some serious tuning and I still want to add character animations.

It’s a single player, multi-character FPS in Unity3D.

Basically, you have to eavesdrop / record a couple’s conversation as they walk around a crowded plaza — without them noticing. To do that, you have 2 long range “sniper” mics watching them… and a guy on the ground following them with an “aura” mic in a briefcase. Keep track of them and don’t lose them in the crowd!

Important stuff to know before playing:

*** A yellow arrow hovers above your target for 30 seconds as an aid at the beginning of the game.  After that, you’re on your own.***

*** Also, keep your briefcase guy out of the couple’s LoS, or else you’ll lose! They have really long LoS! ***

*** Oh, and there’s one huge exploit. See if you can figure it out! ***

Unity Web build, 7.1mb: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/polonius1/WebPlayer.html

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-27/?action=preview&uid=4369

Tags: FPS, unity3d

Thanks to Ludum Dare, I can now boast of my first effectively finished, self-contained game: Viking of Love.

While my earliest attempts at a game engine met with some success (here and restarted in HTML5 here), the short and external goal of Mini Ludum Dare challenged me to slap together something that others can actually enjoy on its own merits.  I dare say that Ludum Dare achieved its goal.

Let me share a word of caution in the hope that you avoid my game’s faulty opening. The very first incarnation of the game began as a retrofit to the platformer demo game that accompanies the Akihabara engine (my second attempt at such) but a few hours of development made it clear that the necessary graphics and code rework would eat up the entire 48 hours before I could even start on the writing.  Putting that aside, I then switched to a platform that I hadneglected for entirely too long: Ren’Py.  My initial exposure to it dates back a few years and I must say that the developers have made exceptional progress since then.  I might just focus on contributing to their ongoing effort directly instead of continuing work on my own visual novel engine.  Anyone looking to focus on the content of their next game would benefit greatly from learning it.

In the end, however amateur my results, I enjoyed the process more than enough to eagerly anticipate the next Ludum Dare.  In the meantime, let me know whether this short but introspective story resonated with you.  Thanks for playing!

James H.