So I was thinking about what to do with this compo… no theme and all Correction the theme is: Draw a 300lb chainsaw!. Started of with a header, or three to be more exact.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under LD #14 - Advancing Wall of Doom - 2009. 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.
Full of red balloons…
Let’s see if I got the request right:
IM IN UR BLOGOSPHEAR
BLOGZING UR WORDZ
IM IN UR BLOGOSPHEAR
BLOGZING UR WORDZ
Oh my… tricksy post editor this, images in the text box even.
and even if we don’t ever use it for a compo, i feel that i’ve done my part!!!
Ludum Dare Zero (Beta, 24 hour), theme Indirect Interaction. My game, Fun Game. Contrary to the name, Fun Game wasn’t a fun game. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere near a complete game. The idea was to (hahaha) create a virtual pet game in 24 hours. Genius idea I do say. I did complete a bunch of art, and had a … sort of working user interface. All in all, not too bad a stab at a 24 hour game… just nothing worth mentioning.
Tags: allegro, eating, final, fruit, fun, game, indirect interaction, LD0 - Indirect Interaction, mouse, not fun, unplayable, Windows
Ludum Dare Zero (Beta, 24 hour), theme Indirect Interaction. My game, Fun Game. Contrary to the name, Fun Game wasn’t a fun game. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere near a complete game. The idea was to (hahaha) create a virtual pet game in 24 hours. Genius idea I do say. I did complete a bunch of art, and had a … sort of working user interface. All in all, not too bad a stab at a 24 hour game… just nothing worth mentioning.
Tags: allegro, eating, final, fruit, fun, game, indirect interaction, LD0 - Indirect Interaction, mouse, not fun, unplayable, Windows
Cuzco’s Goat Bloat Game was my first LD entry. I was pretty amazed that I was able to make a whole game in 48 hours. This game got me hooked on game compos for life 
My fiddling skills were pretty weak at the time, so I had to speed up the music in Audacity so it wouldn’t sound like a dirge. I had fun with the goat AI – it’s pretty realistic. (Goats don’t like water, they climb on rocks, and when you chase them they run everywhere!) Since it was my first compo entry, my “fun” rating was rather low – I didn’t take enough time to balance the levels. Also, the coloring of the goats makes them look like bees, oops!
Escape from Anathema Mines was my second LD entry. I was pretty pleased with how it came out – pretty challenging and fun visually. I stretched the limits of pygame quite a bit in this entry, doing things which look impossible
Tags: caving, darkness, final, flashlights, light, mines, pits, pygame, soldiers
Escape from Anathema Mines was my second LD entry. I was pretty pleased with how it came out – pretty challenging and fun visually. I stretched the limits of pygame quite a bit in this entry, doing things which look impossible
Tags: caving, darkness, final, flashlights, light, mines, pits, pygame, soldiers
The Hairy Chestival is really symbol of what the Ludum Dare competition is all about. Chest hair. This game was challenging because I wanted it to be a game .. as it turned out, it was really only a simulation of shaving chest hair with a lawn mower. I think the thing that gave this game its edge was the introduction, which I shot the images for only several hours before the end of the competition.
Interesting factoids: the man in the intro sequence is a friend of mine named Dan. The chest that you shave in the game is mine.
Tags: chest hair, chestival, final, growth, lawn mower, manly, pygame, silly
The Hairy Chestival is really symbol of what the Ludum Dare competition is all about. Chest hair. This game was challenging because I wanted it to be a game .. as it turned out, it was really only a simulation of shaving chest hair with a lawn mower. I think the thing that gave this game its edge was the introduction, which I shot the images for only several hours before the end of the competition.
Interesting factoids: the man in the intro sequence is a friend of mine named Dan. The chest that you shave in the game is mine.
Tags: chest hair, chestival, final, growth, lawn mower, manly, pygame, silly
Galcon cleaned up pretty well in the compo. Here are links to my post-mortem and history. Truth be told, I’ve been making versions of this game for about 15 years now. But this version almost didn’t happen – during the theme voting for this contest I was leading a large group of people to back a different theme from swarms – I had in mind to make an Adventure Game. But since swarms won, I figured I’d try re-making Galcon again for lack of a better thing to do.
On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.
After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:
Tags: arcade, explosions, final, galcon, planets, pygame, RTS, strategy, swarms, triangles
LD48 #1 theme was Guardian. I created Scarecrow: Heart Of Straw, a game where you play the role of a scarecrow, scaring crows (as they are wont to do) away from corn. I don’t know what Pellies it did or didn’t win. I think it did fairly well, and has a rockin’ crowmetal soundtrack and a mumbly farmer.
Tags: BOO, corn, cow, crows, farm, final, guardian, nehe, opengl, pelican, scarecrow, shopping
LD48 #2 theme was Construction/Destruction, with a minor theme of Sheep. As such, I created Hitsuji: Shears Of Fury, a game where you destroy construction equipment as a ninja sheep. It featured a really cool tweening animation system I wish I had used since, as well as some lovely use of very default Allegro fonts. It also included zombie construction workers, and pelicans. Pelicans appear often in these games.
Tags: allegro, beat-em-up, combos, construction, destruction, fighting, final, gyros, ninja, pelican, sheep, side-scroller, tiles, zombie
Lunar Chickens was quite a fun game to make I really enjoyed taking pictures of my rubber chicken in different poses to get the stop-motion animation used for the character. It was quite a challenge to pose the chicken though, I had to stick wires all through its body to hold it in various poses. The game itself is a puzzle game and fairly “just-ok”. The best bit is the chickens running around.
I don’t think I have this game available for download now, but if you really want to see it, get ahold of me and I’ll put it somewhere.
LD48 #3 was themed “Preparation – Set it up and let it go”. For this I originally made a game where you were a leprechaun and needed to plant traps to kill people trying to come steal your lucky charms. For some reason, despite how fun that sounds, I couldn’t get anywhere on it and quit halfway through. Then I came back on the second day, reusing some of the code and graphics and created NPC Quest! It’s a game of buying gear for a fantasy hero, and then watching him fight battles without your help. It’s actually more strategic and fun than it sounds.
Tags: allegro, fantasy, final, knight, medieval, mutant dolphin, NPC, peasant, preparation, random levels, RPG, shopping, tiles, used car salesman, wizard
A two player shockwave game, highly unbalanced. Play the game here
Player one shoots the sheep, player two resurrects them
Resurrect the sheep when power is on max and all parts are on the table
The sheep walks into the light.
Tags: construction, destruction, final, Frankenstein, Kill, Resurrect, sheep, Sheepenstein, shockwave, Shoot
Ludum Dare #1, theme Guardian. My game, Trout!. Trout! is a game where you the blue fish must rescue the orange fish. Well… assuming they were in peril. Being the first LD48, I still hadn’t got used to how to best work in 48 hours. The game lacked scenery collision, making it no actual challenge at all. Beware the hook though.
The game scored Bronze in the graphics category.
Tags: allegro, final, Fish, guardian, hook, keys, LD1 - Guardian, Peril, Trout, Windows
LD48 #6 theme was “Light and Darkness”. Another theme that came close to winning was Remote Control, which I also included in my entry. So I made Habitat For Horror. This game is quite flawed – it’s a somewhat interesting and worthwhile puzzle/arcade game where you have a limited supply of fuses with which to keep rooms lit in an apartment building. Evil CHUDs crawl up from the sewers, but can only travel in the dark, so you must keep your tenants safe from them. The flaw is that in order to have remote control, I have you working only on a fusebox rather than clicking directly on the rooms you want to lighten or darken. It’s just kinda weird. Would be much more playable if played directly.
Tags: apartment, CHUD, darkness, final, fuses, light, PTK, remote control
LD48 #8 theme was “Swarms”. It also occurred right around the initial release of the Nintendo Wii. Thus, you get Wee Ninja, a game where you are trying to beat an insanely large horde of other shoppers to the last remaining Wees in stock during the holiday season. It’s fun to play, simple, and includes achievements to unlock bonus abilities. One of the more complete entries I’ve ever done (possibly because the gameplay was so incredibly simple!).
Tags: beat-em-up, combos, fighting, final, ninja, PTK, shopping, swarms, tiles, wee
LD48 #8.5 was an unofficial competition with two themes: Moon, and Anti-Text. “Moon” was actually some insanely long thing about how you’re looking at the moon and suddenly realize it’s an alien spaceship or something, but we just called it Moon. So I created probably my favorite of my own LD48 entries, Moon Invaders. There’s no text whatsoever in the entire game, which makes reading the manual rather necessary, since it’s a strategy game. It’s basically a tower defense game, but instead of monsters following a path, they descend Space Invaders style. I greatly enhanced this game post-compo, working obsessively for a week. I just like it!
Tags: anti-text, explosions, final, invaders, lasers, moon, PTK, research, retro, shopping, space, tower defense, upgrades
LD48 #8.5 was an unofficial competition with two themes: Moon, and Anti-Text. “Moon” was actually some insanely long thing about how you’re looking at the moon and suddenly realize it’s an alien spaceship or something, but we just called it Moon. So I created probably my favorite of my own LD48 entries, Moon Invaders. There’s no text whatsoever in the entire game, which makes reading the manual rather necessary, since it’s a strategy game. It’s basically a tower defense game, but instead of monsters following a path, they descend Space Invaders style. I greatly enhanced this game post-compo, working obsessively for a week. I just like it!
Tags: anti-text, explosions, final, invaders, lasers, moon, PTK, research, retro, shopping, space, tower defense, upgrades
LD48 #9’s theme was “Build the level you play”. Sadly, I came up with that theme, yet still spent the first 12 hours or so of the contest trying to come up with an idea that would work. Eventually, I decided that Medusa was somebody who could build the level she played (by turning enemies into platforms). In the end, I had Medusa’s Lament, a game so simple it could’ve been a flash game you played on the web. But it’s fun for the few minutes it keeps you entertained and features a mildly disturbing soundtrack.
Tags: build the level you play, crows, final, medusa, PTK, statues, stone
LD48 #0 was a 24-hour competition with the theme “Indirect Interaction”. To celebrate that, I created Castle Smash, an RTS game where you have no control over your units. You just make buildings to create them, and decide where to build bridges. Their “AI” tells them what to do. Yes, it’s a lot like Majesty, which I had not even heard of at the time. This is a 2-player (at the same computer) game, with no single player option at all.
Tags: building, castle, final, indirect interaction, knight, peasant, RTS, tiles, tinyptc, wizard
Ludum Dare #3 (2003), theme Preparation. My game, PuffBOMB. Propel a hamster character to an end zone using bombs. Incredible Machine with explosives, burning, and screaming. :). The original compo version, unfortunately, featured only 2 levels.
PuffBOMB scored a Silver for sound, and came in 5th place for fun.
Download: Original compo version
/pb_ld3_full.png)
After the compo, I continued to work on the game over a couple weekends, adding 10 actual levels to the game. Also, adding custom level support, due to Stephen Stair offering to build a level editor. The game was later featured on several on several game magazine coverdisks.
Download: Post compo version (0.8)
Eventually, in 2005, I went ahead and fancied up the original game for submission to the IGF and Slamdance competitions. Changed the graphics dramatically, toyed with some graphical effects like a cartoony fire effect, white outlining effect, and so on. Added a proper menu, and ported the game to the Mac.
PuffBOMB was a finalist for the “Popcap Casual Game Award” at Slamdance 2006.
/pb_igf_full.png)
Today, development continues on the so called “super remake” of the game.
Tags: allegro, burning, final, fire, hamster, LD3 - Preparation, mac, mouse, osx, preparation, puffbomb, scream, Windows
Ludum Dare #3 (2003), theme Preparation. My game, PuffBOMB. Propel a hamster character to an end zone using bombs. Incredible Machine with explosives, burning, and screaming. :). The original compo version, unfortunately, featured only 2 levels.
PuffBOMB scored a Silver for sound, and came in 5th place for fun.
Download: Original compo version
After the compo, I continued to work on the game over a couple weekends, adding 10 actual levels to the game. Also, adding custom level support, due to Stephen Stair offering to build a level editor. The game was later featured on several on several game magazine coverdisks.
Download: Post compo version (0.8)
Eventually, in 2005, I went ahead and fancied up the original game for submission to the IGF and Slamdance competitions. Changed the graphics dramatically, toyed with some graphical effects like a cartoony fire effect, white outlining effect, and so on. Added a proper menu, and ported the game to the Mac.
PuffBOMB was a finalist for the “Popcap Casual Game Award” at Slamdance 2006.
Today, development continues on the so called “super remake” of the game.
Tags: allegro, burning, final, fire, hamster, LD3 - Preparation, mac, mouse, osx, preparation, puffbomb, scream, Windows
Save The Hut was my very first entry into the world of ‘make a game in a low amount of hours’ compos. It was all about The Hut, and how to Save it from the hut-hungry alien invaders. The player had to make sure The Hut survived for a certain amount of time. To achieve this, stuff could be built, but there was a limit set by the amount of credits available. It played as a mix of RTS and puzzle.
Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ‘2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).
You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).
Tags: 2D, aliens, allegro, building, C++, cottage, DOS, final, firs, guardian, huts, invasion, protection, puzzle, RTS, save, tiles, Windows
Save The Hut was my very first entry into the world of ‘make a game in a low amount of hours’ compos. It was all about The Hut, and how to Save it from the hut-hungry alien invaders. The player had to make sure The Hut survived for a certain amount of time. To achieve this, stuff could be built, but there was a limit set by the amount of credits available. It played as a mix of RTS and puzzle.
Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ‘2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).
You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).
Tags: 2D, aliens, allegro, building, C++, cottage, DOS, final, firs, guardian, huts, invasion, protection, puzzle, RTS, save, tiles, Windows
We cheated! We were two ppl working on SokoBomb me (drZool) and dr Elak. Yes, but we told so up front when we begun. Anyways the compo game is a randomly generated sokoban adventure… minus adventure. And the postcompo game is a puzzle/action adventure, without randomly generated rooms. But with whitty npc’s and melting icecubes
The original entry with random levels are here
The post compo beta/demo of the game with hand made levels can be found here including a video of the gameplay. We did enter Swedish Game Awards with it, but did not place.
Here are screens from compo entry:
First random generated level. Note to self: improve difficulty.
Dr Zoolak in a mean mood. Random-generated level.
A visit to cubicle hell, random style.
Here comes post compo screens:
Soko showcasing the latest in weapon sprite fashion.
Refraction in action.
Who farted?
Better put your shades on, those are real hardshadows.
No smoke without fire. Creeping features abound!
Pathfinding up and running, so are the conveyor belts.
Tags: action, adventure, burn, cheat, explosion, final, fire, iso, NPC, pathfinding, puzzle, random, shockwave, sokoban, sokobomb, water, whitty
We cheated! We were two ppl working on SokoBomb me (drZool) and dr Elak. Yes, but we told so up front when we begun. Anyways the compo game is a randomly generated sokoban adventure… minus adventure. And the postcompo game is a puzzle/action adventure, without randomly generated rooms. But with whitty npc’s and melting icecubes
The original entry with random levels are here
The post compo beta/demo of the game with hand made levels can be found here including a video of the gameplay. We did enter Swedish Game Awards with it, but did not place.
Here are screens from compo entry:
First random generated level. Note to self: improve difficulty.
Dr Zoolak in a mean mood. Random-generated level.
A visit to cubicle hell, random style.
Here comes post compo screens:
Soko showcasing the latest in weapon sprite fashion.
Refraction in action.
Who farted?
Better put your shades on, those are real hardshadows.
No smoke without fire. Creeping features abound!
Pathfinding up and running, so are the conveyor belts.
Tags: action, adventure, burn, cheat, explosion, final, fire, iso, NPC, pathfinding, puzzle, random, shockwave, sokoban, sokobomb, water, whitty
Ludum Dare #2, theme Construction/Destruction and Sheep. My game, Sheep Strike. Sheep Strike is a 2 phase game. In the first phase, you construct using Tetris blocks, a defensive barrier to protect the baby wolves. Occasionally getting guns as well. In the 2nd phase, using your guns, you’d defend the base from a bombardment of sheep coming from the sky.
The game scored a Silver in the Theme category.
Tags: allegro, construction, construction destruction, destruction, explosion, final, LD2 - Construction/Destruction, mouse, sheep, shooting, tetris, Windows
Gnome Guard was my entry to LD1 – theme guardian. In the game, you are confronted with a horde of small gnome children, and have to safely guard them home after school.
The title screen
The gnomes will run towards the green pillar, and avoid the red pillar.
But only if they feel like it.
The original download is mirrored here – no idea if the game itself still works: download link
Tags: allegro, final, gnomes, guardian, LD1 - Guardian, linux, povray, RTS
Insanity was my entry to LD4. The topic was “infection”. My idea was somewhat far-fetched and only in the story – the home town of Ian the janitor is befallen by an infection of insanity – so he has to beat up all the scientists at his workplace to find the cause of the infection and a cure.
Since I messed up the base engine (tried to somehow stuff the 3D into 2D), I wasn’t able to finish. There’s just one level with place holder graphics, but the level can’t be won and so the story never reaches its conclusion.
Tags: allegro, beat-em-up, fighting, final, infection, insanity, janitors, LD4 - Infection, linux, scientists, unfinished
Battery was my entry to LD9. The theme was “Build the level you play”. Initially, the open voting hinted at a clear winner of the theme “battery”, for which Hamumu found the best explanation: Battery is a place where bats are hatched. Now, when I woke up the morning of the LD, first thing was I checked the theme, and it mysteriously had shifted. So, I decided to make an RTS where you start with nothing, then have to build up the battery you play.
The title screen.
An in-game shot. Basically, you can order bats to dig (build the level you play), and in the new cave room build different structures for hatching worker and soldier bats and providing food to them. At fixed intervals, a wave of most horrific enemies will attack the battery – so you better have enough soldiers by then.
Tags: bats, battery, blender, build the level you play, building, construction, digging, final, LD9 - Build the level you play, linux, pygame, python, resource management, RTS
Hydra was my entry to LD7. The theme was “growth”. It’s a top-down shooter, where you play a growing hydra.
At the start, the hydra is merely a small worm – and even a single knight who has set out to kill you is a dangerous foe.
Some levels later and after eating lots of knights, the Hydra has reached quite some size. But, there’s now also more knights, and they also got bigger and stronger.
The final form when you win the game – I doubt anyone ever has encountered this without using cheat codes.
Download: original LD7 submission (no idea if it still works on modern systems)
Tags: allegro, final, growth, hydras, LD7 - Growth, linux, opengl, shooter, top down
My first LD entry, for the #7 compo in December 2005.
Story, according to readme.txt:
You’re kidding right? Uhm… Control
Jackie as she tries to escape from her
sugar-induced nightmare by climbing an
ever-growing flower. Flying pigs are
attacking and she needs to feed them
candy until they burst.
Collect delicious pig eggs for score,
and keep a look-out for hearts to boost
your health should you need it.
What more is there to say? You jump around, throw candy, collect eggs and try not to fall into the water as platforms appear and disappear from the randomly growing flower. The flower itself was the most advanced piece of code in this one, and the first thing I started working on. Generally I seem to go about LD compos that way – think of some cool technical concept, then implement it and try to turn it into a retro platformer somehow…
Download, WIN32 binary+src: jackiebs.zip (1.24 MB)
—
Just starting out, no platforms have grown out yet.
—
Flower has grown a fair bit and there are tons of platforms.
—
White pig has eaten too much candy, burst is imminent.
Tags: birds, candy, final, flower, grappling, jackie, pigs, pixels, platformer, retro
Having learnt some great lessons from my previous LD48 entry, Save The Hut, I decided to not include as much boringness, confusion and frustration in my next game. Together with the theme Construction/Destruction, and a cosmetic theme of Sheep, it all became so obvious: I was to make a game where you construct traps to destruct sheep. And lo and behold! there was The Destruction of the Sheep.
I decided to use pretty much the same tech as for Save The Hut, but used it better to get some fancier stuff, like sub tile precision movements, rotated sprites, pseudo 3D particle gibs, and paintable background.
The game was supposed to be a puzzle game, but in the end only a few levels were puzzly, the rest was just mindless, but entertaining, sheep destruction with lots of gore. All in all, it worked out very well, making me a winner in ‘fun’ and ‘complete’ categories, and third in ‘gameplay (innovation?)’ and ‘overall’.
There’s an improved version available, adding some fixes, and a 2x time speed-up button (but there remains at least two bugs and a lot of spelling errors). You can get this version of The Destruction of the Sheep as a .zip archive or as an installer. They’re for Windows.
The original compo version is also available, both for DOS and for Windows (the Windows .exe was kindly provided by Hamumu during the compo). There’s also the source.
Tags: 2D, allegro, building, C++, complete, construction, destruction, DOS, explosions, farm, final, fluffy, fun, gore, puzzle, sheep, tiles, traps, Windows, winner
Theme Growth. I did get a review on this game, here it is:
Not just reliant on a funny intro song, The Farmer is a pretty good game coded by drZool for the Ludum Dare competition. Part Harvest Moon with some Mario-stomping element, you play the role of a farmer who has to achieve certain level objectives shown before the start of each stage. This would usually be a certain number of coins, seed, flowers or fertilizers. You start off with a few seeds that can be used to generate the four items mentioned, depending on when you decide to harvest them by pressing space. Some planning is required as the game will end if you run out of seeds. You will get more seeds if you pick the flowers as soon as the petals fall off. Exchange flowers picked when in full bloom for coins from the shack on the right. Decomposed flowers can be collected as fertilizers, while roaches can be eliminated by jumping on them. The rules may seem a little complicated at first but players should be able to grasp the concept after a few plays.
Ingame screenshot
Theme Swarm. I did a shoot em up, sidescrolling thing. Play the game online
Ingame screenshot
Tags: final, shmup, shockwave, shoot-em-up, shootemup, sidescroll, sidescrolling, startfield, swarm, swarms
I was faily stumped for ideas in this one, ‘Build the level you play’ . The only ideas that I could come up with were Tower Defense style or maybe a netstorm clone. Several people encouraged me to do the netstorm thing, so I had a go. I used BlitzMax for it, This enabled me to make a nice ‘just the exe’ version that just works.
All up, I think I did quite well. I didn’t have time for a proper enemy, so I just added a tower defense style neverending wave of aliens. Instead of the Netstorm style resource collection, I made the ground itself produce energy. This made quite a nice playable element where you made pipes to make the energy flow to the right places. Unfortunately people had absoluetly no idea how to play the game. Unless you’ve played netstorm a bit, it seems there aren’t enough clues as to what the hell you should be doing.
After the Compo, I put together this shot to give people a clue as to what they should be doing
I didn’t make much in the way of post-compo changes to this game. I played with the engergy flow a bit just for fun, I think that’s about all.
Post-compo version is available here
Swarm was my entry to LD8. The theme of was, well… “swarm”. I know, I know, I’m no good with coming up with names for my entries. Anyway, for this game, I coded an entire 3D engine (octree based) from scratch. So, I spent most of the 48 hours debugging octree code, and crammed in some gameplay towards the end. Since I never spend more time on gameplay – it still should be as fun to play as most of my games
This is an in-development screenshot, showing some octree debugging going on.
That’s how the game looks like. Shoot down all the pink, eyed balls to encounter the uber-cool-final-boss-with-superior-AI. (I got feedback suggesting that at least one person actually played long enough to encounter the boss – so I consider the gameplay aspect successful.)
Here’s a mirror of the original submission: Swarm
Tags: 3D, allegro, boss, eyes, final, flying balls, flying monsters, FPS, LD8 - Swarms, linux, monsters, octree, opengl, pink, shooter, swarm
The Destruction of the Viruses was a fairly ambitious (but not very innovative) game written for the Infection theme. The player had to clean out the insides of a computer by killing all the viruses that resided there. The viruses could clone themselves, so it wasn’t always that easy.
It played like a top-down shooter, with FPS controls, and used OpenGL to draw a level that could be rotated around the player.
There were many good intentions, and much love for the number 5 (there being 5 levels, 5 enemy types, and 5 weapon types), yet the game failed badly. The biggest mistake was a bug which made some parts of the game framerate dependent, leaving it extremely hard if you had a low framerate (it played as intended at about 180 FPS). It’s hard to say how it would have fared without the bug, but as it were, it placed about 23th.
You can get the compo version, or its source, if you want to, but I really must urge you not to! Better to get the ‘made working dist’ released a few days after the deadline. Both of them are for Windows and OpenGL.
I have an even better version around somewhere, that I haven’t packaged and released yet. I’ll do that soon, and then I’ll include it here.
Tags: 2D, allegro, C++, destruction, explosions, final, infection, opengl, railgun, rocket launcher, shooter, tiles, viruses, Windows
I tried thinking out of the box and failed miserably.
The theme was growth, I thought of the idea of crystal growth and pretty much made an incomprehensible game with crystals in it. Hardly anyone figured out how to play the sodding thing. The final insult was that I ran out of time so you could build yourself an army but had no-one to fight.
The bright side was I was quite pleased with the overall look and User interface. It’s a basic RTS engine with minimap and group selection, resource collection etc.
Some of the development was stalled due to me not knowing how to debug. I wrote the game In Blitz max, having downloaded the demo version on the thursday before the compo. I didn’t figure out how the debugger worked (or even that it had one) until sunday.
Tags: bugs, Crystals, fail, final, growth, slugs, unfinished
I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.
playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.
I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.
The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles
See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.
Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.
Ludum Dare 8 was my second ‘short term’ game programming contest, and my first solo. The theme was ‘swarms.’ I was bound and determined to do an RTS game this time, since my partners in team compos always want to do something actiony. I think I actually wanted robots or magnets or something like that.
I thought it would be nifty if instead of directly building units, you had to attract units with various buildings. So you start with a base and 1 swarm. There are resource buildings (Apple, Flower, and Metal) that you can hover over that will give you various resources. You also have a base. You can build either Apple or Nectar huts in your base. These increase your attraction rates for food or nectar. (It was originally going to be food and sex, if you read the code. I guess bees have sex with flowers or something.) Once bugs are attracted to your base, you can add them to existing swarms, or break them off into new swarms. You can also build Radar to increase your attraction range, or buildings to increase the power or speed of your bugs.
Initially this was going to be swarm vs. swarm warfare, but I ran out of time pretty quickly. (I’ll go into my mistakes below.) So instead the computer just sent a specified number of waves with a specified strength at you at regular periods, and you needed to have swarms built up and ready to fight when they came.
Obviously one of my largest problems was art. As you can tell from my screenshot, It’s ugly. Really really ugly. All the art in the game was ‘placeholder’ art that I was going to go back and fix. That never happened. Secondly, I panicked at about 30 hours. I barely had an engine, and the deadline was closing in. I actually ‘gave up.’ I came back to it, and finished up later. Thirdly I didn’t have a good plan. I know I wanted an RTS, but I didn’t have a good execution plan. I also bit off WAY more then I could chew back then.
My tips for beginners are:
Random Dungeon Exploration is the result of trying to push the Random theme as far as possible. It got random levels, random enemies, random quests (well, a little bit random!), random items, random player names, and random events. I guess it could have been even more random, but time was a limiting factor.
As for the actual gameplay, it’s fairly simple step based dungeon crawling. And a ‘town’ screen where you can shop and select dungeons. It felt pretty solid, but there were a lot of balancing issues that you’d notice once you reached some higher levels.
The game was well received, placing second in the ‘Fun’ and ‘Production’ categories, and also getting the ‘Best In Show’ UBER prize.
You can get the slightly improved post compo version, or the compo version. Both are for Windows and OpenGL.
Tags: 2D, allegro, Best In Show, C++, dungeons, exploration, final, firs, opengl, random, RPG, shopping, The One Ring, tiles, Windows, winner
This was my entry for Ludum Dare #7, which was the first LD I entered. The theme (growth) eventually gave me the idea of growing a maze.
So, you create the maze as you walk around inside it. When the game begins, the maze is just a set of disconnected squares. Each of these squares can be linked with a set number of its neighbours (how many depends on the square, from none to four), and you create new links by walking from one square to another where there’s no previous link. Once a link is created it can be walked on as much as you want, but a link can’t be removed once created, so you have to be careful when creating your maze so you don’t get stuck.
Once I had that working the deadline was looming close, so I threw in some keys and locks and made the objective to clear all locks of each level, to make the thing resemble an actual game. In the end there was four levels, a random level generator, and also a level editor.
I wrote in the original README that I’d continue to work on the game, something I haven’t done. I still like the general idea behind the game, but it has this tendency to degenerate into just staring at numbers, which isn’t very fun at all, and on top of that it’s easy to get stuck, having to restart the level if you don’t pay attention. Perhaps some of the extra elements I didn’t have time to put in the game for the compo — more tile types, powerups, bombs, enemies — would have made it better (more varied if nothing else), but I think the interface is the main problem. It should be more obvious what tiles can connect, how many exits are left, etc, so there’s less guesswork, no number tracing, just puzzle solving. Since the levels are so “dynamic” getting that to work would be tricky, though.
Download: [ Windows | Linux (x86) + source code ]
Tags: final, jellies, keys, linux, locks, maze, post-mortem, puzzle, screenshot, SDL, Windows
Proof I have real trouble coming up with good game names.
This game was a quick one. A week before a LD we had a warmup, put in 12 hours during the weekend. The theme was vectors and a subtheme of chains.
I was quite pleased with how this worked out in a lot of ways. The rendering was with a little 2d OpenGL style setup where I implemented pushmatrix, popmatrix, scale,rotate,multmatrix,LoadIdentiy, setcolor and line. All of the glowy effects were done by a two layer drawing system, A blur buffer of high saturation drawing and a overlay of bright low saturation. The persistance came from averaging neighbouring pixels in the blur buffer and subtracting a bit. I did that part with a wee MMX routine.
Most of all, the thing that pleased me about this game is how fun it is. It’s a bit hard but I think there’s potential for a great full game in this idea. I build a linux version and had it running on my arcade cabinet for ages, that was great fun.
I guess the only sad part about this on is that if I had have done this for a genuine LD48 I would have used the extra time to make something even better.
The final game isn’t entirely my own work though. I slapped a mod file onto the game for music. Livens it up quite a bit.
Tags: final, glowy bits, Vectors
It was a dull Saturday afternoon and I needed to make a game. I proposed the idea in #ludumdare and got DrPetter and trick on board with the idea. In “4 hours” we whipped together a game about an elephant that jumps on a rolled up squirrel catching falling giraffes while dodging spears thrown by the natives. It’s more fun than a barrel of pigeons!
You can get the game here. Be sure to check out the forums, there are some pretty sharp strategies people have worked out to get ridiculously high scores
Tags: 4-hours, elephants, final, giraffes, mini-game, natives, pygame, spears, squirrels
It was a dull Saturday afternoon and I needed to make a game. I proposed the idea in #ludumdare and got DrPetter and trick on board with the idea. In “4 hours” we whipped together a game about an elephant that jumps on a rolled up squirrel catching falling giraffes while dodging spears thrown by the natives. It’s more fun than a barrel of pigeons!
You can get the game here. Be sure to check out the forums, there are some pretty sharp strategies people have worked out to get ridiculously high scores
Tags: 4-hours, elephants, final, giraffes, mini-game, natives, pygame, spears, squirrels
Photon was my entry to LD6. The theme was “Light and darkness”. I still remember all the time I fiddled with shadow calculations. In my game, each light source does exact shadow calculations with all the level geometry – and in order to still have it all run with < 1% CPU, this was quite some work. Now, there’s nothing special about this except, I wanted to do things in the most simple way possible, this being an LD. And I had to admit utter defeat when I later saw bluescrn’s entry. Instead of spending half of the 48 hours on it like me, he went for a dead simple approach – with the only difference that his was not 100% accurate. Which would have made no visual difference in my game whatsoever. In fact his shadow method would have worked a lot better in my game in just about every respect
I still managed to do quite well. Here’s some screenshots from back then:
The title screen.
The goal of the game is to send all the photons coming from the lamp to the prism, but the problem is, you only can see the areas of the map which are lit up by the moving photons.
To control the photons, you can place mirrors – to light up more areas of a level, and once you have found the prism, send them all to it.
Seems the original submission is still up: original zip at original site
Tags: allegro, darkness, final, LD6 - Light & Darkness, light, linux, mirror, opengl, photons, prism, puzzle, shadow, sparkle
Uplighter was my entry for the Light & Darkness theme. It was a puzzle game centered on lighting up levels to certain percent by, among other things, placing lights, breaking down walls, and removing light sinks.
It’s was my first entry to feature 3D, although all gameplay and lighting is really in 2D, and it was also my first entry to not use Allegro. Instead it used GLFW, which is more lightweight, and I really didn’t need all the extra stuff from Allegro.
Uplighter is probably my best and most innovative LD entry so far—it placed first in ‘innovation’, second in ‘fun’, and also won the ‘Best In Show’ award.
You can get the compo version of Uplighter. It’s for Windows, but there’s a shell script (kindly provided by alar_k after the compo) that will fix stuff so it will compile for linux. You’ll need GLFW, GLFT, FMod and FreeType2.
Small notice: After the compo, it was reported to run very slowly on 3.0+ GHz machines. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but it has been reported that this can be fixed by compiling it in VS. If this is still much of a problem, I might get around to fix it myself.
Tags: 3D, Best In Show, C++, darkness, explosions, final, GLFW, innovative, light, linux, opengl, puzzle, shadows, tiles, Trendy Cellars, Windows, winner
The People was written for the Growth theme, and in many ways it resembles my first two LD games—there’s the tiled world, and you can build things on it. Only in this case it looks more fancy due to some clever tile rendering. Like my two first LD games, it’s a puzzle game.
There’s seven levels of varying difficulty, with goals such as ‘reach a population of X’ or ‘get Y huts’, a sandbox mode, and a tutorial mode. While you build stuff, a simulation is going on where new people appear and so on. A good description of what you actually do is, as someone put it, playing a planetary engineer.
My ‘post mortem’ for the game was pretty much the following:
So how did the game turn out? Good, and bad. My first idea was a kind of God game where you created land and such and people appeared. And there was supposed to be a kind of currency, that I called belief. So I coded the tile system and the simulation first, then I started to try to get it into a game. Well, it didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work without very much job, so I dropped it (the game idea, not the simulation and that). So I figured out another game: You have a limited supply of different kinds of land, and you have objectives to complete. Then there’s supposed to be interesting levels that are fun and challenging. I fixed up a tutorial mode, and a sandbox mode. These are pretty cool. Then there was the levels. I managed to come up with a few OK ones, but then it went downhill. So I ended with 7 levels, of which some are OK. Most are pretty easy, you just have to wait a while. I’m not very happy about them. But on the whole, the game’s pretty OK.
If you’re to believe the unofficial results from my own vote counter, The People did indeed turn out OK, and placed first in ‘fun’ and second in ‘innovation’ and ‘production’.
You can get the Windows compo version, or the Linux port version. They require OpenGL with multitexture support.
Tags: 2D, building, C++, final, fun, GLFW, growth, huts, linux, opengl, people, puzzle, simulation, tiles, Windows, winner
Conways game of live ‘verses’ mode
I think it got a bronze pelly for something.
Slightly updated version can be found here: http://ds.diaspora.googlepages.com/home
Tags: final
The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.
You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.
The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.
There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.
Tags: 2D, arcade, boids, C++, dancing, GLFW, hats, humor, intro, islands, non-entry, opengl, random, silly, stick figures, swarms, Windows
Ultra Fleet was my entry to the LD8 Swarms compo. For a bit of background information on it, please read about The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands.
Set in space, you controlled a fleet of virus ships that could convert enemy ships. Fleets of enemy ships kept on attacking, and you needed to keep your fleet alive so you could go on fighting, gaining points while doing so.
The game was, if anything, more pretty than fun, but it really was playable once you got into it. Although you probably got bored within an hour or so. Don’t know how it placed, but it received OK scoring, and also got praise such as ‘The game I’m supposed to be reviewing is more like a screensaver’, ‘I liked Hat Swarm better, though’, ‘Without a doubt, Hat Swarm is WAY better’, ‘I honestly would have given the hat swarm a higher score though.’ But seriously, some people (including me!) actually seemed to like it.
You can get the Ultra Fleet compo version. It requires OpenGL and is for Windows, but I’ve been able to compile it for Linux, although I have no idea where that port went, but it should be pretty easy if you want to try yourself.
Tags: 2D, arcade, boids, C++, final, fleets, GLFW, opengl, pretty, ships, shooter, space, swarms, trails, Windows
Infection Wars is a multiplayer game where you use an “infectatron” vehicle to bring a population of “protoplasmoid” objects over to your color. There is a (fairly dim) AI to play against, but it’s best if you’re playing splitscreen head-to-head with one or more humans. It supports up to 4 players (with multiple joysticks/gamepads, preferably, or keyboard, or mouse).
It was written using PyGame (no OpenGL), and was my first game development contest entry. For a while, I had been driving around with a license plate holder based on the game.
This came in 9th in both innovation and completeness. I’m still rather pleased at how this game turned out – it’s a pretty simple game with some easy-to-understand but unusual mechanics. A few more hours could be spent on the game to fix a few shortcomings, including the fact that sometimes the protoplasmoids get hung up on walls, and that the AI is regrettably (and nigh-unplayably) dim.
Tags: final, infection, multiplayer, pygame, python, split screen
I don’t know what the theme for this Non-Compo was (I think there wasn’t one), but I made a yahtzee clone. Much more than a clone, though, it is far more complicated than Yahtzee, allowing you to score a bunch of different ways.
As you can see, there are 2 colors of normal ducks, and a King Duck. So you can score in the Same column if your dice involved are the same color, the Diff column if any different ones are involved, and in the King column if the King is involved. The High column is one you can use if you ever get another column twice, but your second time is a better score than the first. It makes some sense when you play it. And to stop a die from being thrown on subsequent rolls, you put the ducks to sleep (as you can see in the picture).
This was my first actual 3D game! Well, my most finished 3D game (even though it’s not finished). Those dice are pure 3D, hand coded from scratch. Take that! Their rolling is real, not just a visual representation of a random number generator – they get a random spin on all axes when thrown, and wherever they stop when they land is what they are on. The code to interpret their facing into a number was the tricky part.
Too bad for you, you can’t play it – there is no downloadable version at this time.
Probably my least-finished LD entry (not counting ones I didn’t even start), Termites is the adventuresome tale of a small band of termites on a very small screen. All you can do is wander around and chew up grass, making termite babies with which to devour the couple of buildings onscreen.
It’s kind of entertaining to enjoy the simulation a bit. This ‘game’ cannot currently be downloaded anywhere in particular.
Tags: bugs, final, growth, simulation, swarms, termites, tinyptc
As a kid sometimes while driving, I’d imagine that I could shoot lasers out of the left and right sides of the car. The goal was to hit only curbs and nothing else, by turning them on and off to avoid gaps and such.
Can a child-hood fantasy be turned into a passable play mechanic? You be the judge!
In this game you travel through the brain, stomach and anus of your loved one, who unfortunately has cancer cells spreading throughout her body. Your job is to ‘clean up’ the curb, er, cancer.
The fifteen levels are each randomly generated using different rules, in later levels, her coughing causes (sort of) neat graphical effects.
Download the game
Download the source
Tags: final
For Bathroom Teacher, I took some pics of the bathroom in the park near my house and then figured out a theme to wrap around them.
You ‘construct’ mudballs to throw at sheep when you notice they are coming out of the wrong bathroom. It’s for their own good!
It starts off a bit slow but very soon you’ll see the point of the game is to wrack up massive points with combos.
Tags: final
For Bathroom Teacher, I took some pics of the bathroom in the park near my house and then figured out a theme to wrap around them.
You ‘construct’ mudballs to throw at sheep when you notice they are coming out of the wrong bathroom. It’s for their own good!
It starts off a bit slow but very soon you’ll see the point of the game is to wrack up massive points with combos.
Tags: final
For once I legitimately follow the theme! In this game drunk people fall in the water and you must boat around to save them.
The catch? It’s dark and only with the help of the lighthouse beam can you see where the rocks are!
This entry is probably my best, because it’s well rounded. Smooth low-tide/day/night cycle, power-up system, sfx that fit the action (it’s was a lot of fun to voice drowning people) and I even had extra time to work in audio references to Space Taxi and Hamumu’s “koolkat bad”.
Tags: final
For once I legitimately follow the theme! In this game drunk people fall in the water and you must boat around to save them.
The catch? It’s dark and only with the help of the lighthouse beam can you see where the rocks are!
This entry is probably my best, because it’s well rounded. Smooth low-tide/day/night cycle, power-up system, sfx that fit the action (it’s was a lot of fun to voice drowning people) and I even had extra time to work in audio references to Space Taxi and Hamumu’s “koolkat bad”.
Tags: final
I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.
This is kind of a WarioWare like ‘stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion – very, very quickly.
I played the guitar bits.
Tags: final
I happen to be at the Zoo when I got emailed the compo theme (thanks Pov) so I snapped a bunch of pics hoping I could shoe-horn them into the game, which I did.
This is kind of a WarioWare like ‘stroke’ based mini-game. You stroke your mouse (this is just sounding dirty) to knock flies off annoyed animals in a smooth motion – very, very quickly.
I played the guitar bits.
Tags: final
This was my second entry, and the first time that I got something playable. This is still one of my favorite games from LD, even though the graphics are a little simple.
TIE is a puzzle/platformer, where must build a roadway across a series of ice floes, while avoiding the exploding sheep.
You can find the game here:
http://www.vickijoel.org/ldgames/TransIcelandicExpress_U1.zip
Tags: editor, final, iceland, LD2 - Construction/Destruction, platformer, puzzle, sheep
Buttonlands was for the LD#5 contest, “Random Levels”. This was an RPG style game based on “Buttonmen” from Cheapass Games. My favorite part of this was the random map generator, which generated really nice looking results.
I also had a lot of fun with the character and location descriptions for this one.
Playable Buttonlands is here:
Tags: final
The theme for LD9 was ‘Build the level you play’ so I thought a neat game mechanic would be a board game in which players take turns constructing the board before they play. As it turned out, I was leaving for my honeymoon on the second day of the competition, so I really only had about 24 hours to work on the game.
With this game I did the development a little backwards. After planning a little bit, I usually jump into coding, but this time I did all the graphics first, then did the coding. I may adopt this methodology for future competitions because as I’m working on the graphics, I can think of more ideas and such.
Graphically, I think it looks pretty good. However, in terms of gameplay, this game is a little boring (as the title may suggest). I think the extra 24 hours would have helped me flesh out the ‘building stage’ part of the game, which would make the resulting game a little more fun.
Game written in Python+Pygame, here’s a zip with a win32 build and source: http://fydo.net/programming/LD9-boredBuild.zip
Tags: 24hour, boardgame, final, fydo, LD9 - Build the level you play, python
This was my entry for the LD #6 contest, “Light and Darkness”. In this small platform game, your goal is to avoid the rain drops and light up all the candles in each level.
Unfortunately, I didn’t finish the game in time, so you can’t actually complete a level (I spent too much time drawing the graphics).
The game was programmed in Delphi (using the DelphiX library) and I used Tile Studio for the graphics. You can find more screen shots and download the game (and source code) here.
Tags: 2D, darkness, delphi, final, light, platform game, Windows
Moon terraform pong was a rather half-hearted entry for the LD 8.5 warm-up compo, with the themes Moon and Anti-text. It was an experimental entry, as it was my first using the D programming language. I don’t think I spent much more than an afternoon on it.
In the game you terraform the moon by playing pong using it. Get past the opponent paddle and you gain a bit of terraforming, if it gets past your paddle it loses a bit of terraforming. Also, when blocking successfully, speed is increased and size reduced, increasing the difficulty. Granted, it starts so terribly easy it’s only be the end of the game it plays at a decent difficulty, but hey, the moon really is rather big.
The game doesn’t feature any text, but an image at the ‘title’ screen really explains it well enough. Click to start, move mouse to move paddle. Easy.
You can download Moon terraform pong. It’s for Windows and requires OpenGL.
Tags: 2D, anti-text, D, final, GLFW, moon, opengl, pong, Windows
It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!
This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.
As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.
This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration – but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).
Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.
I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.
Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).
Download: Windows version (575 kB)
–
–
–
Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp – type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.
Tags: crazy hard, final, moon, music, pixels, puzzle, retro, sphere
It’s got MOON, it’s got NO TEXT, and it’s got blocky pixels, chirpy audio and all the other essentials!
This was a strange “compo”, but several interesting games came out of it and I had a good time working on mine. The 24-hour time limit was rather severly busted, but that’s fine I suppose. DQ means surprisingly little around here, especially since this compo had no voting.
As usual for me, the main idea was a technical one and involved using a sphere-mapped rectangular playing area. As one theme was “moon”, this seemed easy enough to work in. The actual game concept was undetermined until rather late in the process. At first I was thinking that maybe you’d drive across the moon in some vehicle, collecting things… but that didn’t happen, so I changed it. The final game is pretty cool imho, where you drop/stack colored chips onto the moon to make them disappear.
This all sounds very lame and boringly puzzly in theory, but the main challenge is the hideous control scheme. You don’t control your position directly, or even your speed, OR the acceleration – but the next-higher derivative! Tap right and you’ll see very little happen at first, but after a few seconds the moon starts slowly rotating in the chosen direction, and then it goes faster and faster unless you compensate in the other direction. It’s very easy to overcompensate and end up in an oscillating back-and-forth motion where you have no real grasp of what the hell you’re doing, but play the game enough and you can enter into a sort of zen state where you can “feel it” and get along pretty well. This is really essential, since you need to position yourself very accurately over the chips to avoid missing (and thereby creating a new stack which needs to be completed and removed).
Unsurprisingly, most people that tried the game hated it. Once I realized where it was going I pretty much tried to make it as evil as possible, much like a lot of old C64 games which you find in some old dusty drawer without a manual and have no idea whatsoever what to do with. You’d start a game and almost instantly die, and the controls weren’t obvious at all or severely broken. Ah, the heritage.
I’m really happy with the music though, sets the mood nicely. Imho the game is worth playing a few minutes for that aspect alone if you’re a retro geek.
Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read some instructions (that you shouldn’t really get if you want the full frustrating experience).
Download: Windows version (575 kB)
–
–
–
Quick instructions: Arrow keys to move/rotate, Z to drop chips. Do not drop like-colored chips on top of each other.
There’s a small cheat which might make the controls a tad easier to grasp – type “showyou” at any point to bring up an acceleration graph in the top-right corner.
Tags: crazy hard, final, moon, music, pixels, puzzle, retro, sphere
Ah, great compo this was. Tons of sweet games. Unfortunately that also meant fierce competition, and I only managed to snag a best position of 3rd in Fun (which is unusual for me, as I normally do better in the technical categories).
Base idea for the game was to have the level be “swarming”, for an unexpected approach. I figured there could be loose platforms drifting around in space and you’d try to jump around between them, doing… stuff. The gameplay part of it was sketchy at best.
I suppose the better part of the first day was spent getting the platform movement and interaction working, and then I think much of the second day I just sat and tweaked it, fixing bugs. The gameplay elements and final graphics/audio were added in the last two or three hours.
Windows download: 128 kB zip (exe, data, source)
Linux port: 16 kB tar/gz (needs above file for data)
Arcade build a’la Lerc.
Tags: collisions, final, jetpack, map, physics, pixels, retro, space, stars, swarms
This was my second LD48 hour entry (the first having been lost to the eather) and is pretty much the opposite of my first entry. The first had shiny 3d graphics but poor controls and gameplay. This attempts to focus purely on game play and avoids doing any graphics.
Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to balence the difficulty, so it’s very, very hard. Still worth a play if you’ve got a few minutes though, if only for the mental swirly plasma flux which may or may not have been proven to give people seizures.
More details and download link here!
Tags: final
My third LD48 entry, and so far my best. This just about manages to include all the stuff I missed in the previous ones – nice graphics, fun gameplay and the difficulty curve is about right (well, except for the insane spike right at the last level).
Also, I think the way the plants grow is rather cool. Lots of seat-of-the-pants platforming to keep you on your toes.
More details and a download link here!
Tags: final
For the LD4 in 2004, we did a series of preparation compos. They were much shorter as a real LD, and as theme had the remake of an agreed upon classic game. One of them was Robotron (the others were Sapce Invaders, Frogger and Spy Hunter). In the Robotron one you had 4.8 hours for the game. My entry turned out to be a much better game than the one I actually wrote with 10 times as much time for the real LD. Oh well.
The game is rather simple. One directional input (cursor keys) controls the movement of the pink blob, another one (ASDW) controls the gun. Just like in the original.
There’s 30 partially random levels, and quite a lot of different enemies with unique behaviors.
Some of them, like the crab and the spider, were added in a post-compo version. Those are really hard (but fun, this is one of the few of my games I play through occasionally), as is the final boss. The crabs circle you, and the spider tries to aim ahead when shooting – back then I was still good at calculus, apparently The final boss doesn’t shoot you directly, but takes a lot of hits and spawns random enemies.
Tags: allegro, blobs, crabs, explosions, final, linux, preparation, remake, robotron, spiders, stars, triangles
This was my second Ludum Dare entry, for LD#8. Theme was swarms. This time you’re playing the Master of Fireflies, out for revenge against some mushroom-dwelling things who didn’t invite you to some insignificant party last week. So you send your swarm of fireflies after them to torch their mushroom homes. That’ll teach ’em! The mushroom-dwelling things doesn’t take kindly to this though, and starts spraying water around, which unfortunately kills your swarm and stops the mushroom fires. The battle is on!
This was the first time I made something with a swarm-like behaviour, which was nice. The game turned out ok, though not really finished — those mushroom-dwelling things only ever face right, for example, and the levels weren’t supposed to be that flat. There should have been platforms and stuff. Still, there’s a win condition and level progression and such, so that’s something at least. Anyway, it’s kinda fun-ish for a little while, torching mushrooms while those poor guys losing their homes at your hand try to kill off your swarm, but it gets boring and repetitive after a while.
Oh well, I had fun making it, and learned some new things in the process, so I choose to consider it a success regardless =)
Download: [ Source code ]
Tags: attack, final, fireflies, linux, mushrooms, post-mortem, revenge, screenshot, SDL, swarms, water, Windows
My entry for Ludum Dare 8.5. LD 8.5 wasn’t a 48 hour compo, we only got 24 hours to make the game in, but the start time was flexible so you could choose the 24 hours of the weekend the compo was held that was best for you. I managed to use exactly 24 hours on my entry =)
Themes were Moon (actually “But even if you doubt their overwhelming findings, the Moon will never be the same to you again. Never will you raise your eyes to look at her without wondering: IS IT OR ISN’T IT AN ALIEN SPACESHIP WORLD?”, but everyone interpreted it as just “Moon”) and Anti-Textmode, no text at all in the game.
The story, which you have to guess at since there’s no text (and the readme is rather sparse), goes: You’re a rabbit, minding your own business on the moon, when one day a butterfly comes flying from somewhere. It flies straight into a crater, which happens to lead to a huge system of caves beneath the surface. Curious rabbit as you are, you follow it, and so the game begins.
When I started making this I actually intended to make one of those bullet hell shooter games, but for some reason the game evolved into this cave-flying exploration game in stead. Or, well, calling it an exploration game might be a bit of a stretch since there’s only 5 rooms in the game, not counting the exit room (which is a very quick drawing of what’s supposed to be me in my bed, getting a good night’s sleep after 24 hours straight spent coding and drawing), but it would have been if I had spent less time fooling around with the code. For such an art-heavy game you’d think most of the time was spent drawing things (all the rooms are just bitmaps, there’s no tiles), but I actually spent most of the time on code. So, the art didn’t take much time, which kinda surprised me, though of course everything being lores greyscale had something to do with that, and I did rush it a bit too. Anyway, doing the art was a lot of fun.
So anyway, you fly around in this cave system, collecting flashing ring things to open gates while avoiding monsters and projectiles and such. It’s a shame the game is so extremely short, because I really like it and think it could be a good game with some more work. Maybe I’ll get back to it sometime =)
Download: [ Windows | Linux/source code ]
Tags: butterflies, caves, exploration, final, greyscale, linux, moon, post-mortem, rabbits, screenshot, SDL, Windows
The theme for LD 9 was “Build the level you play”. The premise is that you’re some god or something whose sole purpose in life is to control the path of some space fish, guiding them through gates that changes their colour, and get at least some set number of fish to go through the spectrum in each level. You control their path by creating planets, of course. Planets attract fish using the laws of gravity.
This is actually the first game where I’ve used OpenGL, apart from some small fiddling. (This also made it easy to make the game window freely resizable with hardware scaling, and I made sure the window always keeps the correct aspect ratio by inserting black borders where appropriate. Incorrect aspect ratios are always annoying.)
That aside, this one didn’t go very well. I spent a lot of time just fiddling around with insignificant things and not getting any parts of the game done, and about midway through I changed the aesthetics from creepy-ish paper-cut-outs floating around — something which at least looked somewhat interesting — to badly drawn space fish, and also inverted the planets, for reasons which completely escapes me. I had also coded up an in-game level editor that I used to create the included levels, but this was disabled for the compo release. For a compo where the theme was “build the level you play”. WTF?! Why did I do this? I have no idea.
The gameplay itself also had its issues. I think I made the gravity a bit too “realistic”, since inserting a planet subtly effects everything — so it doesn’t really matter if you’ve fine-tuned your existing planets to perfection if you have to insert a new planet or even move an existing one, the new gravity will upset the fish and you’ll have to fine-tune again. So, while the gameplay can be fun-ish for a little while, the constant required adjustments can quickly get annoying.
After the compo I played around with visualization of gravity by using a GLSL shader, which made the game somewhat more interesting (not to mention extremely colourful). Another thing I tried, both during the compo and after, was making the planets be effected by gravity, so they’d float around too (until they collided and launched themselves at light speed off the screen), and also make the fish generate gravity, attracting other fish and planets. Somewhat fun to watch and play with, specially with gravity visualization enabled, but the game was pretty much impossible then, heh =)
Download [ Windows/source code ]
Tags: final, gravity, linux, opengl, planets, post-mortem, screenshot, SDL, space fish, Windows
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This time the theme was “Build the level you play”. In this game you are controlling a spaceship. Normally your craft or ship jumps with small bounces. You have only control, space-key, which makes your craft jump a lot more. Simple as that.The goal of the game is to collect the triangles hidden in the level. The count depends on the level you are playing. After you have chosen the level you get a change to build the level. This happens also with one key, space, here you need to carefully craft the level so that your bumpcraft will make its way from start to end and in the meanwhile bounce on all possible triangles. Well, that’s the gameplay.
Try it out! [ http://traction.untergrund.net/temp/bumpc10.zip ] Game finished 2nd in the final results, which was big surprise for me I didn’t feel at any point that this game was that good
LD8.5 was my first game competition so I learned alot about unmanageable 1500 line functions. I had a few empty source files all nicely laid out, but I still managed to dump everything into 2 files. The themes were “Moon” and “Anti-Text”. So I decided to make a tower defense game based on the moon, and the enemies were letters A-Z. There are only 2 tower types, but there are a few things that can be upgraded like “damage”, “speed” and “distance”. All of the upgrades are fairly self explanatory. I used visual studio c++ 2005 express and photoshop to build the game. I used a modified version of nehe’s startup code and i wrote a small png image loader, the rest was done over the 48hr period.
The gameplay is quite simple if you played a TD game before. Click on the tower you want to buy and place it on the map. You can also use the 1-2 number keys as shortcuts. To upgrade a tower, just click on a tower and buy the upgrade. Try making it to the end, you cant. have fun!
Download [Windows 481kb] [Time-Lapse Video 5.43mb]
Tags: final
The first round of theme voting is open! There are over 200 themes, and there are going to be two more rounds of voting!
Sign In and click on the Theme Voting link in the grey box.
The first round is all 200 themes – starting NOW!
The second round will be the top 50 themes – starting sometime on the 9th.
The third & final round will be the top 12 themes – starting sometime on the 12th.
The final results from the third round will be announced on the 14th at 8pm PST to begin the compo.
This is the game I made for the sheep contest, you can run over sheep with your tank and shoot them.
features:
Flowers n Bees was made for the 8th Ludum Dare 48 hour programming competition. This was my first attempt to create a game in 48h, so it was quite a challenge to come up with something playable at all. The goal of the game is to gather honey for the winter. However, you cannot collect honey on your own. Instead you have a swarm of bees at your command that can do the gathering for you. Flowers n Bees was programmed in Python using PyGame, PyOpenGL and PGU.
Oh no! All your pocket money fell down the sewer! What now?
Just flip out your favourite magnet, tie it on a yarn and try to retrieve all your coins. The coins are attracted by the magnet. Wouldn’t it be easy to have common sewers like everybody else…
Can you retrieve all your money?
One rule of the contest is to give away the sourcecode. It’s inside the .zip with the binaries.
Duh, forgot the link:Click me!
Your name is not of importance. Your mission is simple:
Top secret data has been separated and hidden in several countries. Break into the buildings and retrieve the secret data. The data is usually kept in a green cabinet. You must not be detected. Go inside unseen and find the cabinet. Once a guard sees something suspicious like a light which doesn’t belong or hears a sound he will start the alarm. Once the alarm is on you cannot escape. We will have to deny any knowledge.
As usual for those competitions the complete source code comes with the game.
Tags: darkness, Endurion, final, LD6 - Light & Darkness, light
Assuming I get around to entering, there’s a good chance I’ll be using this as my foundation, with Allegro.
It’s a collection of header files and code, commonly found in my more recent prototypes. C++.
And that’s that.
The library I have is a in-progress re-write of my pgu library .. sort of a “the best bits” version. Anyway, here it is:
svn://www.imitationpickles.org/pug/trunk
The gui API is about the same as pgu, so if you wanted to use it, you probably could. It’s lots better
Other than that, I’ll be using pygame and python as per usual. I’ll also be using pyplus + swig in the event that I need to write any C extensions.
Update: check out demo2.py – for low-CPU updates and Joystick support!
Tags: library
Tags: art, awesomeness, motivation, poster
This was my very first LD entry ever!
It was written with python + pygame. I don’t have my original compo submission version handy, these screenshots are from the slightly polished version of the game that I have available on my website. Since “Anti-Text” was one of the themes, there wasn’t a title on the title screen, nor was there the status bar on the bottom of the screen when playing the game. The final version has the same original 3 levels as the compo submission though.
All in all, I’m quite happy with the result. It’s a nice simple game that allowed me to show off some of my ‘graphics-making’ abilities. I spent the majority of my game development time doing the graphics. The first level in particular took a very long time because I digitally painted it using my wacom tablet (see the second screenshot above). Phew!
You can download the game (both win32 and python source available) and find a bit more information here:
http://fydo.net/projects/buggygame
Tags: buggy, buggygame, exploration, final, moon, moonbuggy, platformer, pygame, python
With all the C/Python/SDL-based libraries mentioned here, I’d like to advertise my/our gamedev library, Gosu. It has originally been my private library, spread only via ICQ/IRC to interested people, until I made it public to use it for my LD3. That is a while ago, and in the meantime, it has been used for some LD entries by me and other people, also for more serious projects, and is actually documented.
Long story short, Gosu is a 2D game development library for Ruby and C++. I guess the C++ version is a bit too heavy to learn until Friday *and* actually use, though. The Ruby version gets you up and running quickly.
Pro (compared to your generic SDL wrapper): *Very* fast graphics with rotations and all that, because the library was designed to use OpenGL; an API which tries not to get in your creativity’s way; examples on how to integrate it with ImageMagick and the Chipmunk physics library; serious OS X support.
Contra: Linux port misses gamepad support; can’t handle too complex text input well.
If you would like to give it a try, the library can be found at http://code.google.com/p/gosu.
CEngine is a Python library I started writing mid-2007 for doing a remake of Chaos: Battle of Wizards by Julian Gollop. The library uses PyGame and OpenGL and is still far from complete – I haven’t even started on the remake yet, but there is some functionality in the library that may be useful for this competition.
