Originally posted on http://www.36peas.com/blog

The guys over at http://www.ludumdare.com have started a competition for this month.

In very basic terms it boils down to:

You’ve got a month to build a game and try to sell at least 1 copy.

If you wish to get slightly more of an insight into the competition than I’ve explained – See here

This was particularly appealing due to a prototype Gareth put together some time ago but never had a place to really apply it – But an immense desire to get it used for something. This prototype was for a game called Retro Racer.

At the minute this is a fairly crude but fun little game with a couple of tracks, some basic dynamics and a simple control system thrown in. A screenshot has been thrown in for your enjoyment 😉

The basic concept we’ve arrived at for it is to have some sort of non-traditional racer, possibly some sort of gate runner idea.

Anyway, that’s where we’re up to at the minute – we’ll be putting extra posts up as we develop ideas for this project some more.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

The art style we’ve chosen to utilise within our Ludum Racer has been derived from our upcoming iPad title: Dead West.

It’s a limited yet fantastic looking colour pallete, designed to make full use of the amazing high contrast that suits the iPhone and iPad particularly well.

Below are several screenshots that show a styling screenshot from Dead West, through converting it to a ‘track’ to showing where lighting effects etc are, and finally to a finished product including a horse and trap contraption that will be used in the final finished product.

The drawn on notes indicate different obstacles etc to add a bit of variety and shape to the finished track.

To stop things looking too bland, some lighting paths were sketched on, darker parts showing shadow and lighter parts indicating, well, light. This further enhances the route of the track.

Finally, with some edges defining the sides properly and some nice lighting, we’re left with something that looks much more like a track.

Our game design is moving on, and we now have a working prototype with some fancy tracks, but still much, much more to do.

So this was part way through the first conceptual idea, the green markings are bits that’ll probably change and evolve as seen fit

And this is where the thing is up to currently.

Obviously this is still very early stages, but progress is fast (And needs to be!)

More updates as and when.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

We’ve recently decided that in line with all the other Ludum Dare projects, simply calling our project the ‘Ludum Racer’ would not be in the true spirit of the competition, so we’ve actually thought about names, and have changed the theme slightly.

It’ll now be known as ‘Dwarf Dash’ and will feature Dwarfs on trikes, or similar.

Development-wise, collision detection code is being written (Some technical info on how we’ve used Adobe Illustrator’s SVG format and TouchXML to create the collision mesh here), and we have a project that we can actually run. Time’s tight, but things are looking OK.

No eye candy this time I’m afraid, just boring ol’ text!

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Dwarf Dash (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Today (Or what would have been on Monday – Cheers, my faith in internet applications) is a massive update on our Dwarf Dash project.

Firstly – as detailed in my last post, the name has changed to ‘Dwarf Dash’ and we now have our title art as below;

Now – the more exciting news is that we have several fully rendered levels. They’re all playable, and whilst only simple tracks all have working collision meshes.

The sprite physics have all been tweaked and we believe work well on every level, and there’s some feeling of speed attached to make it a fun little game.

Then there’s 3 biggies:

ANIMATION – Our sprites are now animated – so as they wonder round our dreamed up levels they’ll be pedalling away with the wind blowing through their hair.

SOUND – We’re close to deciding on background audio, but our dwarfs now have a sound as they move about too, this varies in pitch and speed depending on the movement of the cart. Again, this gives a great feeling of speed and of things going on around you.

AI – Yep – AI. This as of yet isn’t quite finished, but there are several AI characters in the game, at present they have no real pathfinding ability (Although there’s some weird attraction to seeing them scatter) but this is under review and should be sorted fairly soon.

I think that’s it for now – But what was a working prototype is now all of a sudden starting to look like a real game – Menu elements are being designed and hopefully — We’re not all that long off submitting the thing for approval!

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

We’ve had a change of thoughts on our Ludum Dare Dwarf Dash project.

The original deadline for the project was to have a game that could be submitted by the end of the month.

As things lie at the minute, we have a game that we could easily submit to the Apple store for review, but to be honest we don’t want to do that.

The game that we’ve come up with has surprised us in playability and already seems to be quite a lot of fun – because of that we want to extend it a little and add some features and content. We’ll be launching it as a kind of hybrid game jam / actual release.

We’ll continue to update this blog with progress and link to announcements and other information as and when available. Look forward to reporting back again soon.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.