Greetings.
Only learned about the ludumdare a few days ago, and decided I’d give it a try if I could come up with an idea when I learned about the theme. Now almost 12 hours later, I’ve finally got an idea at last. 36 hours to make it? Might be enough. Got the monday off anyway. 
I’ll be using Python and Pygame btw. Beyond that, most will be from scratch I guess.
Cheers.
Tags: roads
hello!
It’s a road simulator.
I didn’t originally even plan to participate since timing of this compo was bad for me.. but then I ended up doing something anyway since our plans for the day were cancelled. Not sure yet if I will actually make an entry or not!
I wanted to try out some track generation stuff using control points, and that’s what I did… without any goal of what could be a viable game. That was done pretty quickly, but I don’t actually have inspiration to continue to make a game which looks like this test.
With 1 day and 11 hours left I start working on my entry. I’m confident this time, I really think I can pull a good game this time around.
I’m thinking in a racing game or something like it. Anyone remembers Road Fighter?
Goodluck to everyone, and better luck for me 😛
Psnake
Well I’m definitely getting back on track, the past few hours have been rather productive. I just love the feeling rolling out lines and lines of reasonable code, I’m really enjoying myself at the moment.
I’ve mostly been doing stuff behind the scenes stuff. I’ve put in an entity spawning system so that player+enemy positions are all stored in my level data. Rather happy with how it’s worked out (I’m wondering why I haven’t done something like it in the non-compo game I’ve been working on recently).
Then I’ve put the groundwork in for some rescuable stickmen things, I’ll come clean and say the *idea* of rescuable things that follow you I’m pretty well ‘borrowing’ straight from my other game. Having said that, time is (obviously) at a premium, it’s a concept I’m particularly fond of, it looks pretty cute, and it’s going to work a bit differently here, so, *shrug* I don’t really feel bad about it.
Here’s how it looks at the moment (the stickmen things bob up and down a little, it’s kinda cute).
Oh yes, and finally, why the title? The suns going down now here, and I started working before it started coming out. The bulb in my rooms light has blown, and the bulbs I bought to replace it don’t work for whatever reason. So, coding in the dark it is!
Tags: screenshot
Well I’m off to a great late start 13 hours into the compo. We’ll see just what sort of entry I can pull off. I’m afraid I may end up using TGB now since I am a bit more short on time than I’d like.
Not a huge amount of visual progress – but I’ve got some player control and camera code working – took a lot of tweaking to get something usable…
Now I need to get a player vehicle in (wipeout-style hovering thing), and decide whether to keep it wireframe or start texturing it…
Progress? Well, it has been SLOW. Last night after the theme was announced I must admit I was quite stumped. I couldn’t even remember if I had voted for roads or not. I knew that this time around I wanted to pick a game scope that I could pull off in the allotted time. All the immediate ideas I had were way to ambitious though and I felt like I was merely wading through game ideas that were either too complex or just not interesting to me to put the energy into in order to accomplish them in the timeframe. Also, I admit I was blindsided by not being able to get past thinking about cars instead of roads. So, I basically took last night to let the ideas seep and the subconscious work on it. I played a bunch of Left 4 Dead with two friends and another Ludum Dare steam group member who was also (procrastinating?) like me.
That was a lot of fun, but anyway I digress! I went to bed late and uncertain. I loaded my subconsious up prior to bed by browsing hundreds of google images for “roads” looking for inspiration. I then slept about 6 hours but had no dreams about roads. Before sleep I had a few ideas running around in my head but nothing felt “right”. I was thinking about a mailbox baseball game but couldn’t decide on perspective. I was thinking about a garbage collecting game but decided it would be too ambitious. So, this morning after a bunch of coffee I was suddenly hit by a vision and sketched the following:
And thus, CoMuTor was born. Basically Rampage + Gridlock = CoMuTor. I feel that I just *might* be able to pull off this idea in the time remaining. Still a lot of details to work out but basically I’m thinking that the idea will be as follows:
You are CoMuTor a monster that for some unknown reason have appeared downtown during rush hour and must battle your way out through gridlocked traffic to the suburbs and then the country. Of course you will get to smash and battle many things along the way as any “Rampage” type game should allow. Why are you a monster in the city? Umm.. why not? 😉
As you can see, many details remain.
Tags: comutor
Now I have three layers of stuff drawing properly… It’s about time I got the player in there I think..!
Just woke up a couple of hours ago, and saw the theme. Ferociously busy, but have an idea. Will try get the engine written today, add some game tomorrow…nothing coded yet though :/
and: breakfast (wip shot):
Tags: food
It’s Saturday morning! Here’s breakfast!
Apple-cinnamon pancakes that my wife made while I started working away again. I don’t really have much to show for it yet, since it’s all behind the scenes stuff to manage the background and road. When I get something, I’ll post it, hopefully before lunch.
Well, I think I have a functioning idea for my game, just how much ends up being implemented I can’t say. The basic outline is something like this:
In a post-apocalyptic world (nuclear disaster, baby!), a major raised highway still runs across the country. This highway is known to the people simply as the Road — the lifeblood of the communities that still exist across the blighted landscape. Your people have lived here at the Road as long as you can remember, trying to scrape together a living by trading with and providing services for travellers. When your father dies, you take over leadership of the village — but as bandit attacks get worse and worse, your village loses too much, too many people. Eventually you end up resorting to attacking travellers for what scant supplies you can scavenge from them. You become… Highwaymen.
Epic, eh? Sweet. Ok, so I’m thinking it’s gonna be a top-down action game inspired by Zelda. You have a village that you can upgrade through money and materials you scavenge from attacking traders and whatnot. Likely the village will be off-screen, merely controlled through a menu. The game will play out in a large patch of highway, where your allies (other people from your village) and you will fight people, getting money and materials with each kill. Upgrading your village gives you better weapons, armor, and more people. Basically, it’s gonna end up being an arena fighting game (set on a highway), with allies and enemies, and an upgrade system based on cash, that happens in between fights.
Now, I fully recognize this is a fairly large scope, especially considering that I already wasted 3 or 4 hours last night doing things like playing L4D with HybridMind. I’m going to start with just you fighting other dudes, top down, on an open plain, and go from there.
Spent a lot of time playing around with this game and trying to settle on some gameplay, and I think I now have it. I also completely re-did the controls, and they have changed from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, haha. The biggest addition is a ‘bridge’ move that works like a jump, but you will have to recharge it. It means that you can avoid crashing into your existing roads and also jump over streams.
This will probably be a small single-life scoreboard based game. I’m pretty excited about how this plays now… lots of work to do this evening though!
And here’s an older picture with some trees, to prove I still have trees in my game! XD
.. Dinner.
Forget about the ‘healty’.
.. but MrPiglet does!
Please excuse the blurriness.
I’ve been taking a couple of hours break for a shower, food, and some general mooching, figuring there’s no point getting burnt out too early. Back to the grindstone now though, time to make this game a game!
Oh yes, also about time I did an Important Stats Update
Hot Brown Caffeinated Beverages: 5
Food Consumed: porridge + cheese on toast + quiche
Time Spent Actually Working: around 8hrs
Total new Lines of code written: 727
16×16 Sprites drawn: 17
Many thanks to my girlfriend for cooking a baked potato for me! Omnomnom!
I have a follow-camera working in my game now, and it’s starting to feel much more like a real game. I need to start working on implementing the rules now.
Tags: foodphoto
I think I’ll drop out. Theme is uninspiring this time around, and I can’t seem to come up with a good game idea. I might throw together some sort of Towlr game with Lua, but I’m not going full-out and making a big epic game 😛
Good luck to everyone else. Have fun LDing
Here is the idea behind my entry : you’re a car with a crane on it and you have to fill the gaps on the road, so that the vehicles behind you don’t get stuck. The gameplay is that you have to approach the gaps enough to fill them, without falling into them. And of course each gap you miss (which leaves the screen) makes you lose a life, points or whatever.
Here’s a screen :
and here is the game in its current state.
Well I think I’m loooong overdue a status update on my entry, so here I go with my first post for LD13.
Screenshot:
I’m using python and pyGame this time, with other tools of choice including the Eclipse IDE, Graphics Gale and GIMP.
I was hoping to get some kind of Grand-Theft-Auto-style engine working for my game, but I think I’ll have to pick up the pace if I’m going to get there. My game currently consists of a red car driving around in a fields full of red dots, with some questionable from-scratch-written physics. I hope to get some actual roads in there soon
