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

What is your favorite theme?

You must sign in to vote.

You must sign in to vote.

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

Tags: final, LD9 - Build the level you play

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:

• intro animation with hilarious sounds
• buggy scrolling tilemap
• 2 different kinds of sheep
• annoying music

Tags: final, sheep

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.

Tags: 2D, bees, final, flowers, pygame, python

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!

Tags: Endurion, final

This game is a little real time strategy game. A body has been attacked by viruses. It’s on you to fight back the intruder. Only armed with an antidote you have to revert ill cells and defeat attacking viruses. Simple graphic and funny sounds helped the game to get rank 24 out of 66.

Tags: Endurion, final

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.

My “Custom” Library

It’s a collection of header files and code, commonly found in my more recent prototypes. C++.

• A vector math/matrix library, plus some other math tools. Partially documented!
• A set of functions for drawing circles, lines, and rectangles with Allegro, transformed by a matrix.
• A collection of string functions to compliment STL String. Mostly for filename manipulations (get the base name, directory only, etc).
• Class building tools (including the “useful” part of Boost)
• FileIO with Compression (LZMA, BZIP, ZLIB)

And that’s that.

Tags: allegro, library

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.

Tags: gosu, library, ruby

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.

Feature list and download.

Tags: library, opengl, python