You guys and your impromptu compos.

From the mailing list:

Hey,

It’s time for some more game compo good times! The compo is going to be on the weekend of Feb. 23rd. Since it’s a warm-up, there won’t be exact start and end times, just show up and have fun! Theme voting will be on the website prior to the compo.

Join #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org
www.ludumdare.com/compo/

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

I’ll be back soon. I’m just trying to minimize my distractions for the next week or so.

(02:11:23 PM) philhassey: the theme voting will be in the channel .. starting around 6 hours before the compo
(02:11:39 PM) philhassey: we’ll come up with some themes around that time
(02:11:46 PM) philhassey: and then i’ll post a voting thing on my website ..
(02:11:50 PM) philhassey: theme will be released at the start
(02:12:00 PM) philhassey: then you’ve got 48 hours to do whatever ..
(02:12:45 PM) philhassey: basic idea is to spend around 12 of those hours working ..
(02:12:51 PM) philhassey: not as “intense” as a real 48 hour compo ..
(02:13:08 PM) philhassey: entries won’t be judged, but we’ll post them on the website so there is easy access and people can leave comments and junk
(02:13:18 PM) Hectigo: Sounds good
(02:13:31 PM) philhassey: i’ll post that on the site ..
(02:13:31 PM) jolle: and award trophies ^_^
(02:13:33 PM) philhassey: yeah
(02:13:37 PM) philhassey: trophies are a must
(02:14:21 PM) RobotGuy: Thanks, that’s helped alot.

Tags: rules

Copied from my Dev Blog

So eventually you’re going to have to put in moving/walking/talking elements of various varieties in most any game. Maybe they are lemmings. Maybe they are AI controlled bot opponents in an FPS. Or maybe they are soldiers in an RTS, or enemies in a hack and slash. In any case it’s daunting to add these gameplay elements because the behaviour will ultimately require so much tweaking and experimentation. Where do you start?

Carefully creating a system for managing/handling such creatures is… somewhat uninspiring work. And worse, what kind of result do you get? Did you end up forgetting some crucial detail, or do you get a very complex, neural-net-enhanced AI that just acts stoopid? Good luck!

When you see your little guys moving around, only then do you start to see what practical changes you can make to their behaviour. It doesn’t mean you can’t have larger scale frameworks in place, it’s just that even with these frameworks (e.g., pathfinding) it’s not too obvious how to code the heuristics until you are into.

This brings me to my Golden Rule of Adding Moving Gameplay Elements:

First, just add something that stands still and you can zap.

Of course, “zap” might stand for anything. Maybe zap means clicking an RTS unit. Or talking to an NPC. But your first implementation should not worry about movement or anything. It should just create the actual unit, place it. You can start to work out your enemy placement/spawning system at this point, or start to think about how they will behave. But either way, what you really need before you can get started on any practical level is to get it placed. And in order to do that most easily, just forget everything else that will have to go into it for the time being.

I would do well to remember this in the future. This way of thinking avoids me spending all kinds of time mulling over millions of options without anything to start experimenting with. With a purely dumb element placed, purely dumbly, I am able to start the kind of wheedling experimentation neccesary to make it work.

Tags: AI, bots, enemies

Hi! my name is Goldbuick! I just recently showed up on the ludumdare radar! I’m looking forward to participating in my first compo and I wanted to post my tool of choice.

http://qixl.demiverse.com/

Qixl currently runs on Windows. It does not run under Wine. Ports to other OS’es are planned.

Qixl is a specialized lua interpreter based off of luajit.
Basically it’s lua + additional built-in classes to manage simple graphics, audio, music and mouse/keyboard input.

Tags: qixl low-fi pixel engine

Homepage has been padded with another couple of old projects – go see

This time around it’s a semi-usable animation editor (for making PNG images move around in a neat way) and a video smoothing experiment (no download, but lots of text and a demo video!)

Nooo! How dare you be Wednesday already Time! I’m not ready yet! Noooo!

It’s all your fault Time! Blamed is you!

Only around 24 hours to go before the warm-up, so now is a good time to know that the blog works.

Everyone ready?

I hope the theme is moon mice.

Here is a link to my entry for the first 48 hour Ludum Dare competition. It was Freighter Defense Force. Kind of weak, but still one of my better ones.

http://www.xmission.com/~sgray/ld48/game48.html

A screen shot is here:

Ok! I’m here. I’m ready. I made it.

My goal for this weekend isn’t so much to build a game, but to do a Lua implementation. I powered through the literature and some articles earlier in the week, so I know what I want to do with it (object specialization scripting and an experiment with cut-scene scripting). And if I’m lucky, my test scripts might turn in to a mini game, for the compo.

Fun fun!

Ok! I’m here. I’m ready. I made it.

My goal for this weekend isn’t so much to build a game, but to do a Lua implementation. I powered through the literature and some articles earlier in the week, so I know what I want to do with it (object specialization scripting and an experiment with cut-scene scripting). And if I’m lucky, my test scripts might turn in to a mini game, for the compo.

Fun fun!

While trying to think of a decent game to make for the Weird/Unexpected/Surprise theme (a theme I had voted for, but never expected to win, so I never thought about any real game ideas before start), I sat down at wrote Banana Ship.

It’s not meant to be a real entry, but yet follows the theme quite well. If anything, it lacks in that it’s not much of a game, you just have to figure out what to do, and it’s not much of that either. It’s more like a short story, really, but you might enjoy it for a minute or so before it ends.

You materialize out of nowhere, and have no idea who you 
are, or what you are expected to do.    

You are wearing a pink sheet cut into a really ugly robe.  

All around you are filled with nothingness, except for a 
small, yellow banana, floating in the air right in front 
of you.  

>

Tags: adventure, D, humor, non-entry, silly, surprising, text, text adventure, unexpected, weird

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

– Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

– Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

– A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

– A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

– A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (“Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

Tags: idea, surprise, text adventure, web game

Well, I was rather disappointed with the theme, but I managed to get a game going. It’s called “Invasion of the Blobs”. Earth is taken by “surprise” when a mass of “weird” blobs have been spotted by a high-range space satellite orbiting Earth, and “unexpectedly” a top-secret spaceship fighter is deployed to take them out.
Screenshot is below. Enjoy!

Tags: prerelease, pygame, pymike, python, screenshot

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

Tags: idea, intro, log, Mr Head, screenshot

Well, I spent day 1 playing WoW, watching TV, and trying to come up with an idea with no success.  Now it’s day 2, and things are coming along really smoothly:

There’s more functionality done than you can see in the shot.  You can move around the (two-room at the moment) maze.  If there were items, you could use them, drop them, and combine them, but not pick them up yet.  So as you can see, there are doors leading off into space.  If you go that way, you actually stay in the room you’re in, but an edit section will pop up on the screen for the room you tried to enter.  I haven’t done that yet, but you’ll be able to make your own description and layout there.  Then that place is marked “pending” as it’s emailed to me for verification (to check for language and such).  Pending areas can’t be built in or entered, and there’s a “nifty” graphic indicating them.

This is going to be a sight to see!  I can see great potential for impassable situations, but that’s all theoretical right now.  If I didn’t include items and just had riddles, we’d be good, except for one thing – I just know shortly after startup, we’ll end up in a state where all possible paths are blocked off.  But I can always manually throw in doors if that happens.  I could just verify that there is always at least one door leading into the void, but that’d be a very heavy database churn to do.

Tags: maze, progress, screenshot

Here’s the first source release of “Invasion of the Blobs”:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.1-src.zip

Here’s a look at my new menu:

Tags: pygame, pymike, python, release

So we are halfway through the event, but I dont think I’m halfway through what I need to do. with any luck though I should have something that at least remotely relates to the theme. and if not at least I’ll have some pretty looking pixels for ya

Oh yes, I’ve finally reached the spot where screenshots make any sense. Huzzah! To celebrate, here’s a screenshot:

As you might see, the goal of the game is to catch the dropping cows, and bounce them out towards the water. You press the 1 to 5 keys to select which slot is bouncy. Next up is probably to implement some fancy scoring system with combos and whatnot, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, because it’s sleeping time.

Tags: bouncy, cows, log, screenshot

Version 0.2 source code is available here:

http://pymike93.googlepages.com/IOB-0.2-src.zip

Here’s a screenshot of the boss:

Tags: invasionoftheblobs, pygame, pymike, python

Yah, so I might not have a game, but diving into the wild world of OpenGL all the same!! Look at my peachy fire effect:

Tags: fire effects, opengl