This is my first Ludume Dare and I’m very excited and hoping to complete something fun. Here is everything that I will be using:
Language: C# with XNA
Graphics: GIMP
Sounds: sfxr
Music: pxtone/LMMS – hopefully, my music making abilites are quite limited
My Base Code – Consists of a bitmap font rendering system, input parsing, as well as some extension methods, all of which I wrote.
Tags: LD21
I’ve now been working for about three hours and have a little bit to show for it. I’ve got a completely generic screen of tiles and small little character that can run around and collide with the solid tiles. So far I’m still thinking of an idea, but I obviously have the general direction that I want to go in set. It’s going to be a reverse tower defense game. Instead of building towers to kill mobs, you are the mob and you are trying to escape. The idea might change if the mechanics don’t work very well, but hopefully that general idea will stay the same.
Here is a video if it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plRtQoZRzi4
Also, these posts are being mirrored at http://joedev.net
I’ve made a lot of progress and have a lot of stuff working. The towers can now shoot and damage the player. Once I got that working, I switched gears to map generation. I went ahead and spent about 2 hours making a rough little editor so I can make rooms easily (pictured below). Theoretically the game will stich together a bunch of these rooms together and the player will have to navigate though them using whatever items he can find. I probably could have made these rooms in a text editor just as easy, but I always find that tedious and I like the visualization doing it this way.
Tags: Ludumdare
I guess I’ll write a little bit here about how my game turned out. Here is a screenshot as a reference.
Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=rate&uid=4628
This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m glad I participated. My game was originally intended to be a reverse tower defense game but it didn’t really work out exactly like I would have liked it to. I wanted it to be a frantic run through a bunch of randomly put together rooms with a bunch of towers shooting at you. I had that working about 24 hours in, but I came to the realization that it wasn’t fun at all. I contemplated quitting at that point because I was frustrated and a little angry that my game wasn’t fun. I ended up salvaging my game by reducing the number of followers the character has and trying to make the player be strategic with the way he navigates through the rooms in order to protect his followers. I’ll be honest that my game still wasn’t very fun, but I’m glad that I stuck it out and finished.
What went right:
What went wrong:
Takeaways
I really enjoyed participating and I definitely plan on participating in future Ludum Dares. The community here is awesome and I am very thankful for the people who work hard to organize this and keep everything running smoothly. You are doing an awesome job!
Tags: escape, LD21, postmortem
I’ve made some steady progress since the last post a little over a week ago, but I still feel as though I am a little behind where I should be if I want to get this out by the end of October. Pretty much all the systems are functional and I’m spending most of my time additional enemies and random features to increase replayability.
Here a couple screen shots:
The UI is a little busy right now (There are 3 progress bars), but I’m having a hard time coming up with a layout that I like. I’ll probably end up sticking with something similar to what it is now.
Tags: october challenge
This will be my second Ludum Dare and I am very excited. I will be using the same technology that I used last time.
I will also be using a small game utility library that I have written that include some basic Font rendering and helper functions. I will include a link in this post to it once I have uploaded it to my server.
I’ve got kinda a basic idea of what I am doing and I’ve gotten a lot of basic stuff working. I hoping for it to be a story driven platformer (really creative, right?). I’m kinda trying to take advantage of a reduced color palette to create a mood and reinforce the loneliness of the player. I don’t really know how successful I will be, but working with white+gray+black palette is kinda fun. Also, the physics are currently terrible. I always have a hard time getting platformer physics just right. It seems it either feels a little too floaty or feels a little too heavy. Hopefully I can manage to find a happy medium.
Here is a screenshot, because that’s all most people care about.
A Game of Numbers
RELEASE DATE: August 13th!!!
The game is a math based puzzle game and did pretty well in the last compo. It came in 14th overall, 5th in fun, 7th in innovation. I didn’t really plan on working much further on it, but the response was so good that I changed my mind. I had a goal of trying to finishing something before the next Ludum Dare and it looks like I will be achieving that, as the release date is set for August 13th. This is my first commercial release and I’m grateful to the Ludum Dare community and everyone that supports the site, it is the only reason that my game exists in the first place (I would have never made a puzzle game, I hate puzzle games!
Things in the enhanced version
I am selling using the Humble Store and am excited to see how well it does. I’ve been making games and following the scene long enough to know to keep my expectations low, as odds are it won’t sell a whole lot, but either way it’s exciting to me. I have already picked up a couple pre-orders, some of which paid above the $5.00 asking price, which is a little surprising. I will also be building it for iOS/Android/WindowsPhone a couple weeks after the PC release. I had planned to do both at the same time, but there is more work getting the UI working on the different screen sizes than I thought. Thanks again, this community is awesome!!
Here’s an shot of a new level (shows some of the new mechanics, also is super difficult!)
PS: If anyone knows how to make trailers and is interested in helping, let me know. I’ve been trying for a couple days and I suck!
Here’s the typical post where I state that I am in for LD27 and am really looking forward to it. I participated in LD26 and it ended up being my first commercially released game. In a little over 3 months, I was able to take a simple idea and build it into a finished product that works on Windows, Mac, Linux. I officially released the game today and although the game probably won’t sell that great (It’s a math based puzzle game, it’s appeal is somewhat limited) I am really proud of it and learned a lot in the process. I don’t know if what I make for LD27 will grow into that, but I’m excited about the possibilities. Making games is fun!
Stuff:
It’s a clever math based puzzle game. Basically, if you’re nerdy and you like math, you might enjoy it.
