I am Hinchy. This is my introduction video. (I was going to embed it into the post too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!)

I was going to use Flash but I’m pretty sure now I’m just going to cheat and use Game Maker. (Not literally cheat, you guys!!!) I wish I had more time but I don’t want to use AS2 anymore and I have not enough AS3 knowledge (or anything else knowledge) to really do anything, certainly not in 48 hours. Ah well, there’s always Ludum Dare 18.

EDIT: Forgot my obligatory workspace picture!!

ALSO: I have a mini-site for my LD shenanigans at hinchy.us/ld48 with my twitter ramblings and a webcam feed!

Also Twitter updates from the same page!

THIS IS A LINK TO IT, YOU CAN CLICK IT WITH YOUR MOUSE!

PREMISE: Small and diverse platforming challenges spread across many small floating islands (think Mario Galaxy, but 2D, linear, no crazy gravity, and not in space!).

I’m not sure if I have to declare this or not, but I will be using Game Maker for my project with an external library called “supersound”, for playing OGG music. I’m pretty sure this is OK but I just wanted to make sure!!!

Super duper gameplay footage awaits in the mysterious depths of YouTube! Hurry up and click and save the day forever!

Leftover spaghetti in all its glory! Greatest luncheons!

In other food related news, I had an egg-cheese-and-ham sandwich for breakfast. That I didn’t get to take a pic of, though.

WOW! Get a load of this! Crazy fantastic work in progress game demos await behind this link!

Also, keep staring at me on my webcam thingy because I’m weird like that!!

What’s this…? ANOTHER DEMO?! That’s so crazy!

Oh god I’m so tired, have a demo, I’m going to bed.

It’s done! Enjoy!

CLICK THIS

Dear everyone who came close, but didn’t finish their game in time for LD17,

FINISH IT ANYWAY.

With love,
The Hinch

I‘ve been meaning to get around to another Ludum Dare since the first one I did, LD17 “Islands” in 2010, where I made “Wow, Islands and Stuff!!”. I haven’t had the time since though, but this time, I’m finally back! I’ll be participating in the Jam so I don’t have to release source, as I’m utilizing a sound library for my engine that’s currently only a private release. I’ve been working off-and-on on the reusable game engine for the past few months and I’ll be using this LD as an excuse to get more work done on it.

Here’s my obligatory work area post:

Edit: here’s my own LD25 minisite. http://hinchy.us/ld25/

I came up with this idea before the competition, and have secretly been hoping that this would be the theme so I could put it into action. The player takes the role of the villain in a generic, original Super Mario Bros.-styled game. In the setup for each stage, you can pan around the level and place a limited amount of enemies, platforms, and other objects from an inventory. Once you hit the “Start” button, the dopey, Mario-style platform hero appears at the left side of the stage, and runs through. He’d have very predictable AI — always jumping on enemies and flying a specific height from their heads, always slowing down before a pit, always leaping for powerup blocks, etc. It’s your job to set up the enemies and objects so he dies every time. If he runs out of lives, it’s Game Over, which means you win! (You’d have to kill him more than once so that you can’t just win with a random fluke.)

Half the reason I’m participating in this Ludum Dare is to have an excuse to get a bunch of work done on my 2D game engine. My particular game concept requires a level editor interface, so here’s how that’s shaping up!

You can place and resize blocks at the moment as well as changing their collision type. A list of properties of your selected object appears in the menu on the right, which slides in with the press of the right mouse button. If you don’t have anything selected, the right-hand menu will show a list of placeable objects instead.

Progress continues on my jam game, but I just realized a small dilemma: with just over 24 hours to go, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to call this thing. If you want to help me out, take a look at the stuff I’ve posted and make a suggestion in the comments. (Credit will be given where it’s due, of course.)

Hi there! Nate Wiesel and I (Zach Hinchy) are doing the Ludum Dare jam together this year and streaming it. Check out our trailer, and good luck to all other jammers!

Hi there! We (Nate Wiesel and myself, Zach Hinchy) making a game called Escape Velocity, in which you play as a spaceman stranded on a remote planetoid. With limited, dwindling oxygen reserves, you must explore the planetoid in platformer fashion to collect parts to repair your spaceship, before taking off and attempting to escape the planetoid’s gravitational pull. The more parts you collect on the planet, the easier time you’ll have during take off, but you only get one chance to take off, so you better make your time exploring count!

Right now we’ve got the basic engine in place. As you’re on a small planetoid, gravity is fairly weak allowing for a sense of inertia, and big floaty moon-jumps. Your weapon, a shotgun that fires a spread of pellets, also applies knockback to you, even allowing you to use the force as an extra jump or gain speed in the air. You can also release air to increase your freedom of movement and tightness of control at the sacrifice of some of your oxygen reserves meter.

EDIT: Forgot to mention – the game’s running on my “Sanford Engine” C++ game framework, using OpenGL, SDL, YAML-CPP, CMarkup, Crypto++, Boost, and wxWidgets, as well as our in-house audio library, SonicAmp. We’re also using Ogmo Editor as our level editor. The game will be available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Head after the post break for a screenshot of what the game looks like at the moment. It’s not exactly a looker at the moment –  it’s all programmer art at the moment and kinda currently looks like Thomas Was Alone 2: Electric Boogaloo – but Nate’s hard at work on that and hopefully I will get to implementing his art tonight.