What I have is far from a game.  Maybe if it was a 3-day competition I could have completed something interesting with it, but as it is now all you can do is run around a tiny test stage.  It’s a very quick and dirty 3D engine with terrain collision and animation.  I have a hard time thinking small sometimes.  Maybe next Ludum Dare I’ll learn my lesson!

My Tower Thing – Requires Python, PyGame, and PyOpenGL

Tags: LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

well, for better or worse I’ll upload what I’ve done as the final.

Falling Towers
has “music”, sounds, reach the top to get an ending.

I really should have planned this out more, but got stuck when the theme was announced. I basically did most of it without any idea of what the gameplay was going to be. “hmm, going to need a tower graphic” “wouldn’t it be cool if you could see it building up?” “what would build the towers?” “what if empty towers fell from the sky instead” “oh! gotta have an obnoxious explosion sound” etc etc.

Tags: final

During the crunch I had a pumpkin pie baking, and here it is. Only eat happy food:

Tags: foodphoto

Well, I gave it my best shot. Day 1 was entirely taken up by my fighting the losing battle with Flex.

At about hour 34 I completely restarted my project in Flash8, but writing everything from scratch in 14 hours for my main, complex idea, became obviously beyond me, so about 2 and a half hours from the end I started again with an uber-simple game that I could pass off as a submission. I started the code at around hour 47 for this.

I will upload the finished game when I get a chance, but at the deadline it wasn’t finished, so here is a screenshot instead.

Tags: LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

Well, here’s a screenshot and my tools. I used PDN and Game Maker.

EDIT(About an hour after the compo): WOw, I wonder how I somehow managed to get a screenshot into the first post. Anybody know?

Tags: screenshots, tools

So this is ‘Tower’ since I didn’t bother to come up with a better name.  (I did all my naming duty with Fiona’s Purple Reign.)

The object, of course, is to defend your tower from the onslaught of baddies.  Unfortunately, there is only one type of monster, but each wave has it’s own speed and interval.  Use the arrows to move the guy up and down the tower, or left and right across the top.  A/D change the angle and W/S changes the power of your arrows.

I’ll probably write a post-mortum later, but you can download Tower.

Tags: final, finally done, ld48_12, sleeptime, tower

As per my earlier post, here is the link to the hastily created TowerAssault0, which has absolutely nothing in common with my original plan apart from the name….

Look at the .fla at your own peril. This was written between the hours of 3:00am and 4:30am.

Play Online (Cursor keys to affect trajectory and power, space to fire. You need to refresh the page to try again :>)

Download ZIP containing source and gameinfo

(Entry edited for repackaging and changed host)

Tags: final, late, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008

Well, SMF has failed me, so here’s a more public download link.

http://host-a.net/juliansgames/ld12.zip

Also: Background info: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2008/08/11/oops-2/.

Tags: final

So i clened the project and makefiles, in hopes of it beeing i bit stable, and portable. To compile it, just run make LD in its directory (on linux, not sure for windows).

Here’s the minimal code.

hAnd the Fedora 9 bin.

The old files are no longer available, insted the same link download these.

I hope i didn’t break any rules. 😀

Tags: bin, clean up, source

Entar has kindly made a windows port.
link

Thank you.

Edit: added SDL.dll to the win package, that should fix the problem.

Tags: journal, LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, windows port

OK, so the three levels I included with the Tower Construction Kit were very quickly thrown together, mostly just to demonstrate the different features of the editor sandbox. I probably spent about 60 seconds total making the third and final level (and even less time throwing down blocks for the first two), and honestly I had no idea if it was even winnable. So, I just spent a little while playing with it to find out, and voila, I beat my own game!

It actually turns out to be quite close. The necessary arrangement of the blocks is kind of tricky, which is good. It means this level has a nice balance of difficulty and, well, actually being possible to win…not bad for a minute of furious last-minute scribbling, I’d say

Here’s my timelapse … it wasn’t all that exciting so I added a little running commentary.

LD#12: pansapiens timelapse

Congratulations to everyone who participated. I can wait to see what y’all have created ….

Some post mortem thoughts

• Use remotely hosted version control. My Subversion/Trac server runs on my workstation … which left me without access to my code when we had a several power failures. If the code was remotely hosted, I could have quickly found some electricity and Internet access somewhere else and continued working on my laptop.
• Take some time to think through implementations, write some notes.. I fairly quickly got a good idea for a two-player falling block game, where players competed to build the biggest tower, but could lower their opponents tower by shunting across matching blocks, which would annihilate each other. But I failed to think through exactly the best approach for the falling block game engine. I coded and discarded about three related but similar approaches, toyed with using the pymunk physics engine for a while (couldn’t get static Polys to stay still though …??), before basically giving up on the falling block engine after the second power failure. If I’d sat down and really thought the engine through before coding, I probably would have finished the game I originally intended to make.
• It’s nice to have a fallback. Normally, I would make my fallback plan something like “okay, no time left, just polish now … no new features”. But that assumes you have a turd to polish. In this case, all I had about 12 hours and a useless pile of crap falling block engine that I didn’t understand anymore. Writing an Atari 2600 game would be a crazy ‘fallback’ if it was done in the traditional way: assembly language. Luckily, batari Basic is pretty much like a normal version BASIC, just more restricted (with a slightly fussy, touchy preprocesser/compiler). It’s been years since I coded in GWBASIC … but you never forget the basics
• It’s about writing a game from scratch in 48 hours and having fun. (and maybe owls). I did have fun this LD, but I also stressed out a little bit too much for something that was supposed to be mostly fun. The power failures were putting me on edge .. even so, I’ve gotta relax and ease off on the coffee next time.

Tags: timelapse

Tags: motivation

My webcam timelapse video is available on youtube. I’m not posting the screenshots only one as it’s really boring.

A few tips for people testing my game:

Use the C key to test the alternate camera style (it’s very hard to play with it but it’s nice). EDIT: Also even in normal camera mode you use the END key to place the camera temporarily behind our blobby hero and view what lies ahead.

On the second level, you just have to get rid of the creature guarding the jump point. They always move in your direction so maybe you can trick it.

If everything else fails, use the cheat code: ctrl-shift-J makes a huge jump so you can skip levels or just have fun.

Tags: LD #12 - The Tower - 2008, timelapse

Demonic Tower – Source and Win32 Binary – fixed!

I’ve made a bugfix release that fixes a fatal error. I’ll leave the previous versions up (see my last post), in case you want to see it as I submitted it, but everyone should play this version as there is a nasty crash that happens only when you pick up a certain card on a certain level. I also got the music to link correctly, and the package now works with the Compo Game Loader. No gameplay was impacted.

Enjoy!

Hey everybody,

The 48 hours of Ludum Dare 12 have come and gone.  I’m pretty sure we’ve collected all the entries by now.

The final count: 57+1 entries

I say “+1” because we did have a team that decided to join us and make a game this weekend.  You can check out their game here:

super-tower-smashup

As for the other 57, you can check out the final posts and a lovely arrangement of screenshots here:

Image Grid and Voting

For the next 2 weeks it’s voting time (until August 24th, see clock).  All entrants that submitted a game can rate the other entries.  If you didn’t submit a game, feel free to leave a comment in the respected final posts.

Also, trophies.  If you feel a game deserves a special mention, something silly, something tasteful, feel free to award them a trophy.  Anyone can give trophies, so if you didn’t get your game in but feel an entry deserves a special mention, go ahead and give it a trophy.

– – – – – – –

As for everyone else, our next major compo will be in December.  Date TBD.

Coming up sooner than that, we’ve started doing monthly Mini LD compos.  A Ludum Dare veteran can choose to host a month.  They host can pick a theme, and choose to change/try out some new rules.  Like our previous “unofficial compos”, they are not judged.  You can learn more about it, or sign up to be a host on the Wiki.

http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/

Of course, I’d like to take this opportunity (and a few more) to shamelessly promote Mini LD #3 hosted by me (PoV).  It’ll start Friday September 5th, but I’ll really be abusing the rule change privilege.  The first big change, I’ll be announcing the theme on Monday September 1st.

The theme is different than our usual Ludum Dare fare, and could certainly benefit from a couple days to think about and plan what you’ll be doing.  Then on the weekend, you do it.  The nature of the compo is a little more forgiving than usual, but a weekend for most is the perfect time to do it.

If you’re up for a very different Ludum Dare, stay tuned.

If you were waiting for the Windows versions of my game, Entar was gracious enough to compile a version for me. I put together a Win32 package, and the link is on my final submission post.

Thanks again, Entar!

I’ve uploaded a timelapse video of me writing Breaking the Tower. You can see it here.

The music was made by me several years ago, btw. =)

Tags: timelapse

I ran bbfreeze on the main python script, so should work in windows by simply double clicking the owl.exe (also contains the source, so i replaced the previous link in my final post as well): http://allefant.googlepages.com/OwlbyAllefantsourceandwin32.zip

And I managed to encode and upload a gameplay video i made yesterday while half asleep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWRXimhigvk

(removed embedded link as that seems to be an admin-only feature of wordpress (?))

Not quite a sequal – but I got it working, and I only had to change two lines of code! Yaay!

But compiling all the libraries/downloading dx sdk/converting images to jpg instaead of gif— thats was pains.

It’s a lot of fun, so try it now!

Win32 : for those with Visual Studio

http://www.andrewbeckmusic.com/LD12/TowerOfAbbaAbeckWin32.zip

Win32 : for without visual studio:

http://www.andrewbeckmusic.com/LD12/TowerOfAbbaAbeckWin32NoVC.zip

source:

http://www.andrewbeckmusic.com/LD12/TowerOfAbbaSourceWin32Abeck.zip

Edit:: added non-visual studio version