Man, this was a while back. Magnificent Gunbright is a totally sweet faux-Japanese abstract minimalist shoot-em-up (complete with terrible Engrish) where your ammunition is also your armour. Your blobs swarm around you, you can fire them at your opponent, and you can also collect blobs that rain constantly from the sky.

At the time, I thought that having graphics consisting only of black and white circles was strong graphic design, but the game is completely unparseable from a screenshot and it’s not much better in motion. The sound effects are awesome, though, and no one can tell me different. Bloop-bloop-shinngg!

The game itself? It’s pretty okay. It’s mostly a matter of always moving, and getting lots of shots off at the computer when he’s fishing for ammo. I liked that if you got far enough in, eventually the computer would start with a huge swarm and you’d start with nothing — when you’re on defense, the game is pretty enjoyable. It’s just that when you’re on the offense, there’s no interesting strategy; you either hit your opponent or you don’t.

The best feedback I received was from my friend Patrick Alexander, who draws funny pictures for some gaming website or other, who summed it up thusly: “It’s like Ikaruga, only… only not as good. By quite a lot.” If Magnificent Gunbright had a box, this quote would be on it.

Before MG, I’d tried Ludum Dare once before — LD4, apparently, when the theme was Infection. My entry was to be a puzzle game called Hachoo!, where you were a bacterium who could only move by causing the host you were currently infecting to sneeze on another person. Unfortunately, I made one really stupid mistake which caused me to not finish — I used unfamiliar tools. I was a cocky C programmer at the time, and I worked mainly in embedded systems. When I played with writing games, I used SDL.  So of course the natural choice was C++ on Windows using Allegro. I chose Windows for obvious reasons, C++ because I thought the STL would save me time, and Allegro because I’d remembered being annoyed at the lack of batteries included with SDL in comparison when I was 16. Well, I had major issues with the MingW debugger, the STL doesn’t save you time when you’re unused to fighting with obtuse template-based compiler errors, and it turned out that what was simple and elegant when I was a dumbass teenager rubbed the more experienced me the wrong way. (Not to mention that I made a bunch of stupid rookie mistakes because I forgot key things about the API.)

So for Magnificent Gunbright, I decided to learn from my mistakes, stop worrying about stray pointers and just use Pygame. It worked great! I highly recommend it.  The only downside was that when there are a large number of blobs on the screen, there’s some significant flickery slowdown; I say it’s just an unintentional homage to the NES.

You can download Magnificent Gunbright from my website. It’s built for Windows, but it’ll run on Linux, assuming you have pygame, because all the source code is included.

Tags: final

And so it began…  bluescrn’s first LD48 entry. And probably the best…

It was the start of some recurring themes in my LD entries… 2D tilemaps, too much time spent on particle effects, and a rather loose interpretation of the theme… guarding a collection of arbitrary floating crates from a rapidly spreading fire, by covering them in dripping green goo from a blob character controlled by rotating the world…  Yes, I’d decided very early on I wanted to do some sort of rotating-screen platformy thing, and it gradually evolved into something that very loosely fit the theme…

This is definitely my most fun LD entry to go back and play again – and probably the most complete

The thing I did right was to keep it simple. The level was a simple grid (trivial collision detection), the character was a blob (minimal art effort), simple textures + repeating patterns elsewhere. And fairly simple game logic – which left me time to mess about with effects. And recording some audio, including that most memorable ‘awwww b****cks!’

Here’s an old one – the winning(ish?) entry from the 4th LD48. The theme was Infection, here interpreted by a cheeky wave of communism spreading through cute icon-based conversations! From the readme:

In a quiet, foreign country, all hell is about to break loose.

The populace are being infected by a deadly evil – communism, spreading through the country like a tide of blood. Enemy agents are on the prowl, converting civilians to their cause by rational argument and quiet discussion. This propaganda operation MUST be stopped. As a responsible and patriotic American soldier, it is your duty to protect these innocents from themselves. Should they side with the communists, annihilate them immediately. For as long as they do not – keep them safe and friendly.

— IN SOVIET RUSSIA, COMMUNISM BELIEVES IN YOU.

(NB. In the interests of exploring both sides of every issue, a Soviet Campaign has been included – whereby you, as a responsible and patriotic Russian soldier, are charged with keeping a neutral country free of the influence of the imperialist pig dogs.)

Commies took home a couple of Pellies – gold for Overall and Sound, silver for Humor and bronze for Completion, so I guess people liked it! Mostly, though, it was just a blast to make. I’m not really sure why I’ve missed all the LDs since… probably laziness. Still, I’m usually lurking in the wings to check out whatever people make.

Go download it!

Tags: final

Here’s a green box.

Here’s a red box.

Here’s a yellow box!

Here’s George Clooney.

Here’s George Clooney in a yellow box!

Hiya =] well I didn’t really post anything here for LD10.5 although I was working on something. The theme was kittensweird/unexpected/surprise, and for that I came up with a cat&mouse game where you would play as a kitty stalking mice using line of sight and keeping quiet. There would also be a movable cheese to bait the mouse. I set out to make the game in a side view with 3 axis of movement, which is far too many axii for a .5 compo =/ To save time I was drawing sprites by hand and taking photos of rooms to use as backgrounds, but putting 3 dimensional objects to do line of sight with was a daunting task, it would need a level editor and would be better presented in 3d at that point, too much for one weekend. Oh yeah, and I was fighting off the sickness. pwnd. Here’s as far as I got:

Also, I won’t be doing the LD11. I’m going to be racing my mountain bike on the cross country course at the sea otter classic in monterey, ca. My laptop bike mount is a little heavy for racing joo know?

Tags: LD #10.5 - Unexpected/Surprise - 2008, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008

Ludum Dare 11 is coming! Ludum Dare is a regular community driven game development competition. The goal is, given a theme and 48 hours, to develop a game from scratch. Ludum Dare aims to encourage game design experimentation, and provide a platform to develop and practice rapid game prototyping.

• Website: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/
• Rules & Stuff: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wiki/start
• IRC : #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org
• April 11-18th – Registration and Theme Voting*
• April 18 at 7pm PST and runs until the 20th at 7pm PST

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

*the theme voting will be done in batches almost every day that week. So keep checking back. The final round of voting will be during the 48 hours prior to the compo. If you want to influence what is in those batches, edit http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wiki/ld11:themes and if you think there are themes in that list that are so awful people shouldn’t be force to bother voting on them, join the irc channel and get some folks to agree with you and you can remove them. Lousy and redundant themes will be removed by the ThemeMaster.

Hello world!

I’m really excited to announce the first release of IndieLib game engine. It has been a lot of hard work for several years in which I have been working in this project. What started like a hobby has become in a quite robust 2d engine that I think can be useful for the gamming community, specially for the indie game developers. Because of that I want to offer it to all you for free, hopefully it will be useful for some of you.

The main purpose of IndieLib is to make the things easier for the game developer, specially for those of you that love trying new game mechanics and fast game prototyping. I was really shocked for that brave guys of the Experimental Gameplay Project and the things that I see everyday in TigSource. After seeing what these developers were able to do in just one week, I decided to start working again in and old project called LooverLib and to try to pack in the same engine lot of useful features for being able to make games really quickly using c++. What I wanted was that anybody that know a little of programming would be able to give expression to their ideas faster and easily. I know this first release hasn’t accomplished completly this purpose, but I hope to be in the correct way.

IndieLib is a c++ 2.5d engine for game development and fast game prototyping in a really easy way. Internally it uses Direct3d for hardware acceleration, but doesn’t use DirectDraw or ID3DXSprite, it directly draws textures on polygons. The engine is focused in fast 2d rendering, but also allows you to use 3d models. You can read the main features of IndieLib in the FAQ.

Do you want to see the engine in action? Well, you can just check some screenshots or to download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and to run the tutorials that are already compiled and ready to try.

But an engine is nothing without documentation. For that, I spent lot, lot of hours documenting all the methods and making some tutorials (more will come along these months):
– Api Reference
– Wiki tutorials

I really hope that the engine will be useful for some of you and that you will make incredible games using it. I invite all you to join our forum, and I would be really happy if some of you want to contribute helping me.

Just click and download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and start making games!

Regards,
Javier López

I might want to use this for my entry, so I’m putting it up for free download to avoid cheating.

Just some loader code for PSD images, you can retrieve image data for each layer in the image through pointers to regular 32-bit ARGB  pixel buffers (with individual bounding boxes and positions in the image). Haven’t tested it extensively, and it will probably crash for some images… but if it works for you then go ahead and use it. My idea is to do level layout and similar stuff in Photoshop to remove the need for a level editor. Being able to draw scenery (and collider geometry?) in multiple layers should be enough to make something interesting, and do it conveniently.

Get: psdimage.zip

Tags: code, preparation, psd

I might want to use this for my entry, so I’m putting it up for free download to avoid cheating.

Just some loader code for PSD images, you can retrieve image data for each layer in the image through pointers to regular 32-bit ARGB  pixel buffers (with individual bounding boxes and positions in the image). Haven’t tested it extensively, and it will probably crash for some images… but if it works for you then go ahead and use it. My idea is to do level layout and similar stuff in Photoshop to remove the need for a level editor. Being able to draw scenery (and collider geometry?) in multiple layers should be enough to make something interesting, and do it conveniently.

Get: psdimage.zip

Tags: code, preparation, psd

little-lib is a library for quickly writing small games or OpenGL applications in mzscheme (v372). It relies on OpenGL, SDL, SDL_image, and SDL_mixer to process graphics output, key and mouse input, and playing sound effects. A sample program (demo.ss) illustrates the use of little-lib in these three respects.

little-lib is released under the MIT license. I plan to use this library for my Ludum Dare 11 entry.

Download the source code.

Tags: scheme

Well I’m not new, and know I wont have a chance to enter. I’m here for the free booze.

Bottoms up!

Hi, this is Viridian.  I am simply writing this post to stake my claim as a participant in Ludum Dare 11.  This will be my first Ludum Dare, though I’ve spectated on several others.  Wish me luck!

I’m planning on trying to participate in LD 11 this year.  I just started using PyGame and programming in general in January and have yet to finish anything, so maybe this will force me to at least make something playable and simple.  We’ll see!

 Devon

I’m going to give the LD48 a shot this time around.  It’s been years since I have actually attempted any kind of game coding, and I yanked out my old Killer Game Programming in Java book this week and started going through the chapters again.  The personal challenge with this compo is that there is a baseball game (KC at Oakland) on Saturday that I’m going to attend.  That’s a huge chunk of hours out of the 48.  Perhaps I can come up with a way to make them useful.  Design? Sketches? We’ll see.

At least I don’t have to plant my tomatoes this weekend.  I did that yesterday.  I turned some half-barrels into self-watering planters.  If anyone cares, I’ll have pictures on my home blog, www.lonestranger.net, later this week. 

So I’ll probably use the design patterns from the aforementioned coding book and code in Java.  I’m using Eclipse as an IDE.  I have used Eclipse for some of my work coding in J2EE, but I didn’t know about it the last time I was messing around with game coding.  It’s nice to be able to get the method completion and object browsing that you can do in VS, only not using VS. 

The last LD48 that I did enter was way back in late ’01 or so, for LD48_2: Construction/Deconstruction with a minor in Sheep.  I’ll have to dig out that old fossil if a game that I submitted.  It sucked.  In short, all you did was huck sheep from one side of the screen to the other, knocking over bales of wool.  But I guess the real success was that I completed something in 48 hours.  It’s a challenge in itself.

Anyway.  Good luck to all!

Tags: baseball, java, ld48_11, ld48_2, tomatoes

Hey all-  I’m also going to be attempting my first LD and thought I’d make a quick post to test out this here blog system and say ‘Howdy’ to everyone here while I was at it.  I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a few weeks since I found out about it a month or two ago.  I plan on using Ruby/Gosu and perhaps Chipmunk if the theme warrants some hardcore physics fun. 

This will be my 3rd ld I will enter in. I plan on using the torque engine this time around. Hopefully that will result in something that is actually fun to play this time AND have good graphics. I decided I wanted to concentrate on creating pure game play and making the game pretty instead of screwing around with just getting stuff to work like physics libraries (grrr pyode). Hopefully my 2 weeks of learning torque is enough :D.

GL all

…So it’s time to clean the cobwebs off the old OpenGL+SDL base code, so I’m not wasting valuable time setting up lib/include paths, and fighting with MSVC’s desire to inflict Unicode pain on anything you try to build…

Here’s what I’m planning to use, should be acceptable under the ‘custom libraries’ rule (except for the font texture, which will have to be replaced during the 48hrs)

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48Base.zip

Contains OpenGL+SDL init code (now featuring resolution switching), Texture loading, simple 2D blitting, a basic font renderer, and some pretty incomplete/untested vector maths code. Linked with FMOD and Chipmunk in case I get a chance to put some audio in, or want to use physics…  Somebody should have added ‘Chipmunk’ as a theme!

Somehow, the timing of these LD competitions is always bad for me (except for LD #6 so far). On Saturday I have a rehearsal day with an orchestra and on Sunday there is this yearly neighborhood fair (or whatever that’s called) and then I have a concert with a different orchestra. I still do plan to participate, I’ll probably have about 8 hours and perhaps some more if I can stay awake long enough.

Maybe some day we can also have date voting (like we have theme voting).

It looks like I won’t have much time to develop something during the 48 hours, but I have finally decided to give it a try. I am aiming at something really simple and hopefully not too boring or buggy. I am planning to base my game on the splush-package created by hectigo and as far as I understand, that is not against the rules. So hopefully, I see ya at Friday!

Tags: motivation