…..that I will take part. My tools and weapons of choice will be decided by dice roll 53 seconds before the theme is announced.

Grieve

So far its a bit of a poor physic simulator with a few gameplay mechanics strewn about, so far the only interaction is being able to control your ship/ufo/character/home-island and move other islands. This results in a elastic-y madness until you let them go.  I’d like to say it looks much better live but …. yeah.

The actual premise I set for myself is far from achieved, but I’ll start putting that in soon.

GREEN FUZZY CIRCLES!

Can’t believe I submitted something that might be mistaken by a few for “fun”!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1947

This has been a great weekend, my first ever ludum dare and I learned a hell of a lot of things *not* to do

The game is COMPLETELY different from what I had envisioned at the start. Guess I’ll save that idea for another time. I think I’ll put some more effort into this one later. Maybe make it into a flash port as some have suggested. Anyways, time to sleep. I have work in 6 hours….

Grieve

(P.S. For the record – this is not only my first Ludum Dare but my first ever (reasonably) complete attempt at game design. (not counting a few Flash 4 “goToAndStop” efforts) – Hope you enjoy it!)

It seems some people are having bother running this on XP – I built it on Windows 7 and it seems the error comes from a handler that is in msvcrt.dll on vista/7 but not on XP.

I will try to get an XP build done as soon as I get home from work today. Anyone who is rating my game and can’t get it to run, I beg you to bare with me today and I’ll sort it out.

Thanks,

Grieve

Hey all, the windows binaries seem to be…fixed. DLL’s being a nightmare, but running now…. I hope. I’ve also uploaded the Linux port – it assumes libglut will be on your system, if its not please ‘sudo apt-get install libglut3’ or whatever your prefered method of packet management is.

All files are available in the “Windows” zip on the page. Just run *.exe for win and *.sh for linux

Enjoy!

Oh and the story scrolls SUPER fast on linux machines, sorry about that. Not a “show-stopper” by any means so I guess I’m not allowed to fix it.

Grieve

I’m in. Not sure what to do with the theme/rule/alt-theme.

But We’ll See.(TM)

Grieve

Correction:

I’m in once I get an operating system installed 😀

I’m in.

Going to be using some of the basic end of my code from before/during/after the last LD <here>. I hack on this daily so I’ll get some public access repo up for it asap.

Everything will be in C++ with SDL/OpenGL on Windows. I’m currently putting Netbeans 6.9.1 through its paces as my prefered IDE. I generally code on Windows with the goal of it being compilable on Linux, so I intend to have builds for both available.

I’m setting myself two extra optional goals for this LD as well….

1) to comply with Experimental Gameplays August theme

2) to be portable and playable on WebOS during development

… if either of these get in the way (likely the ‘during development’ part of #2) then they will be turfed for the far more important goal of having something at +48h.

Best of luck all.

Grieve

Tags: motivation

Tags: motivation

Enough of the pseudo-motivational pics, heres my workstation. The odd orange light on the far right monitor is because its actually my server. Its a micro-ATX board mounted inside a defunct 19″ monitor. Works like a dream and is even controlled by the panel on the front! It hosts my irssi, my svn and email.

Protip: Diet Coke has significantly more caffeine than regular!

Tags: deskphoto

Say hello to Marvel!

Him and brothers (Battenberg, Sneaker, Solis and Buffer) will be my company for most of the competiton!

He's not much use for coding, but he's a talented musician

Anyone else got any mascots?

Tags: deskphoto

In part thanks to Hamumu, who’s list helped me put a collection of mechanics into game form, I now have a decent idea I want to run with.  (not like last time where my idea changed like 12 times)

Here’s some basic (and crappy) graphics I’ve made up for it.

As for no-game related things, I had small snack in the form of Red Leicester sandwiches and a can or Red Bull.

ONWARD!

So what happened was this….

I tried to make and RTS right….Yeah. Anyways, due to alcohol, illness and guinea pig births. I was unable to finish in time for the compo, but i figured hey, I’ll get it in time for the Jam. Then I discovered my game sucked, the logic was borked and AI + Turning Circles  = HELL.

So I started again… like 5 hours ago…. and here is the result. Credits to go mkevin747 for CC image of the Demon. Really made my day 😀

FROM THE CLUTCHES OF SATAN HIMSELF (windows)

Title Screen

In Game

Today, after much faffing around I officially kick off my October Challenge game. After a long and heated debate between myself and an empty page in a notebook, I’ve decided to lower my sights considerably. I had intended to make a non-traditional tower defense game, I had two interesting aesthetics for this. One had the working title “In the Loop” and was centred around espionage networks intercepting information to stay relevant. The second was a hacker-orientated TD, where the towers are the various applications deployed in an effort to usurp control of the system.

Upon thinking about it, I realised that even though I have one of these ideas quite well fleshed out in design, to make it fun and interesting will take a hell of a lot of playtesting and iteration. So for this month I’m going to stick to tried and tested mechanics and make a traditional TD. The working title for this is “21 Days” since that is exactly how long I have to finish it and set it free.

My goals today are to get stand in creeps running around a tile-based map with quick and hacky A* directing them. Then get some grid-control and be able to plant towers (that do nothing yet). If I get this game polished up enough in the 21 days I might add a bit of meta-research, between levels you task scientists with researching technology dropped by creeps during the last mission, in order to develop more effective towers to help as the levels and creeps escalate. However, I’m going to focus on having a playable TD first.

Feature creep begone.

I’m developing in Flex/AS3 with Flashpunk. This is counter to my plans, as I had spent the better part of last week messing around in flixel. Flashpunk just seems that much more sensible, I can work far more quickly in it as I find its structure and usage much more intuitive, seems to me it was written more for programmers than flixel is.

Now, if I can resist the urge to play more Civilization I might actually achieve today’s targets….

Tags: actionscript, civilization, flashpunk, flex, Flixel, Ludum Dare, october challenge

EDIT: See there’s a lot of new comers in the declarations of intent. Here’s hoping we have a record number of entries! G’luck and please, treat the Jam as a safety net, aim for the compo!

—

This would be a clever pun if I was going to use Flixel, but I’m not.

After much humming and ha ha ha’ing. I’ve ditched my traditional C++ route for this LD48 and I’m going with Flex and FlashPunk.

Graphics will be IGNORED as far as I possibly can, because I always get caught up early drawing terrible sprites that I end up not using anyway. Once I have a functional fun game that is submittable… graphics will commence.

So here’s the obligatory list….

OS: Ubuntu 10.10
IDE: VIM (Vi IMproved)
Language: Actionscript 3.0
Tools/Libraries: Adobe Flex OSS SDK 4.1 & FlashPunk
Graphics Package : GIMP (& VIM for the extra masochism cherry)
Sounds Effects: Dunno, maybe /dev/urandom and VIM for even more self-flagellation

Coffee, Diet Coke, Pizza and other junk likely included.

No doubt a healthy dose of Guinea Pig intervention will also be involved.

Lets get it on.

Not over enthused by the theme, but I’m drunk right now, so who knows what i really think.

I’m eating this…

…thats supper. gonna grab a couple of hours and hope i wake up before monday. Might have some game thats y’know, fun….maybe.

Slainte

Been about 7 hours since I started. Got a basic mechanic and now going to start polishing it up and add a game to the game 😀

Heres a shot of my little snow plough working away to try and discover what lies beneath all that snow.

My little digger working hard to clear the snow.

A view of the hackerspace, lots of RPG'ing going on in the distance there.

27 16inch Pizzas. FUEL!!!

And its done. Had to remove a few things near the end that were just not good enough and ruining the game as it is. That included my fancy overlay and effects.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1947

—–

“The power has died and you’ve been sent out into the desolate snow fields. Dig through the snow to uncover the abandoned power plants. Bring them online for long enough to win.

Be careful, You’re not alone in the snow fields.”

——-

– Mouse controls. Click anywhere on the title to start.

– Power plants have a multiplier effect, try to keep them all on at the same time.

– Space bar can help clear snow, but only 3 times.

I just came home from the bar to find that THIS won. Awesome. Now to sleep and ponder the possibilities.

EDIT: I’m probably going to use flashpunk when I awake,  but in case i don’t my c++ basecode is here :https://github.com/grieve/stile

Grieve.

So hangovers are evil, but at this point seem to be the normal progression for the first day of LD for me. I am attempting to regain the ballmer peak with some chemical flavoured pear cider.

The illusive goal

My game is going to me side scrolling platformer, with puzzle elements. (I never do platformers, so this is virgin territory for me oddly). The THIS will be a robot companion, who fills many roles based on the level and elements of the puzzles. Hope to get the majority of the game knocked out in the next few hours and then watch the UFC, before returning tomorrow to make the puzzles.

Tags: foodphoto