Hey all- I’m also going to be attempting my first LD and thought I’d make a quick post to test out this here blog system and say ‘Howdy’ to everyone here while I was at it. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a few weeks since I found out about it a month or two ago. I plan on using Ruby/Gosu and perhaps Chipmunk if the theme warrants some hardcore physics fun. 
Just my workspace photo to get into the spirit of things here..
Just a close-up of my ‘chariot’ for the competition… code in style. 😉
Don’t have any food photos to contribute as I was out to dinner in town and sorta forgot about that aspect. Well, I’ve gotta go get xchat installed now so I can be distracted by IRC too.
a minimal cereal..?
Well, while I try and step back from the IRC channel for a bit to collect my thoughts on the theme announced ‘Minimalist’ I feel nothing would hit the spot better then some minimalist toasted -o’s. No fluff here, just the bare essentials.
Tags: cereal, foodphoto, friday, minimalist
That’s my working title currently…
Well, it’s about 3am here EST and I think I’ve gotta shuffle off to bed. I’ve spent the past 4 or so hours working in art programs on concept art and haven’t written a lick of code. I’ve basically been listening to Deep Mix / Moscow Radio which I’ve found very inspirational for this theme whilst I’ve drawn animated bitmaps to the beat.
I started out in Corel Draw and then ended up in Tile Studio. I got inspired while I was in Corel Draw and then took some of the concepts over to Tile Studio to flesh out further in tile / bitmap format. I came up with my main character animation sprite sets and got a nice test animation that I actually don’t know how to dump out to an animated gif to share. Too tired to figure that out right now, so nothing visual to share yet. Now I just need to keep fleshing out the scope of the game / gameplay and see if I can code something usable in time! Phew..!
I’ve enjoyed seeing everyone’s posts and chats in the IRC channel. I hope you are all having a good time! 😉 What an adventure.
mmmm.. breakfast sandwich and OJ. Good morning ludum dare 11.
My girlfriend said she’d make me a breakfast sandwich as long as I post it to the LD blog, so how could I refuse? It was gooooood too. 😉
In other news, I got about 6 hours of sleep and am working on getting my basic character functional in a code test so I can post something game related soon.
Finally got a screen shot here along with a link if anyone on win32 wants to try my character test and let me know if my exe doesn’t work. Basically got my character tiles from last night all coded in and initially timed between states.
The current player character MinMo has two states. A ‘Min’ state where he is a little thin snake and a gelatinous block ‘Mo’ state where he can’t move but will probably be invincible. You are frozen as ‘Mo’ currently until the time is up where you then transform back to ‘Min’.
You use arrows to move left and right, space to transform, and ESC quits. Now for more game elements!
win32 exe available here
Here is another screenshot of MinMo. I have got a basic ‘block’ class defined and working for the land now. Basically, keeping to the concepts of the theme with min and max (or mo?) the blocks will be moving up and down possibly signaling their moves with color changes ahead of time. Another minimalist thing I’m trying to incorporate is that your little MinMo player guy can’t jump. You will have to use the moving of the ground blocks to get around the world. You WILL be able to fall though and I’m still thinking up what kinda of implications this may have. I am still brainstorming other aspects of the game (enemies, goodies etc) but nothing too concrete yet.
So, now I’m off to a birthday party I’m throwing for my girlfriend so I won’t be back for about 6 hours or so. Then it is a late night sprint on the game, some minimal sleep and the final crunch on Sunday to pull this thing off. Good luck all!
Tags: gosu, journal, minmo, ruby, screenshot
Well, I’m back a couple hours later than I thought I might be (go figure..) 😉 But, I did snag one great picture of copious amounts of dead thing grilling over a backyard fire at a friend’s house.
Anyway, I’m back and checking out all the posts and happenings I missed while most of you were still coding away today! Gotta get back on the coding horse if I’m gonna pull this thing off tomorrow, still a lot to do!
Well, I’m back up and starting to wake up.. (mmm coffee) I was too tired last night to tag the evening with a journal update as to progress of MinMo so I think I’ll do that now as I recollect my thoughts and tasks for the day.
I managed to get about 3-4 hrs of code in last night during which I got the block classes correctly picking new heights, updating to the new heights etc. It looks really neat in motion and there is something about it’s minimalism that I do like.
I got the player char position to be updated as the blocks rise and fall and started working on more advanced collision detection. I need the char to correctly get stuck in the block valleys and be able to move left and right only when their block is above neighboring blocks. Sounds simple enough right? 😉
I managed to piece something together that was crudely working after fighting through some annoying bugs but basically hit a wall of tiredness where I was causing more harm than good. So, I went to bed hoping to refactor a bit better / clearer algorithm in the morning and then hopefully add a few more elements to make this thing a ‘game’ and maybe even slightly ‘fun’. I still have hope even though there is less than 10 hrs left in the compo.
Well, at least breakfast doesn’t need working collision code to be yummy. I’m thankful for the small things ya know? 😉
I ate this while detailing out new collision code algorithms for MinMo on a notepad. Then, I went for a brief bike ride around the neighborhood while thinking about them. Time to implement!
Tags: breakfast, collision, eggs, foodphoto, journal, sunday
So, after some sleep last night I have finally finished a good working pass on all the character vs moving blocks collision tests. Had a few bugs / kinks to work out that I introduced due to tiredness last night. Now everything seems stable and falling seems to work good enough for now. Plus, the characters position correctly updates as the blocks move up and down and the character can now fall down and meet a moving block without problems. Plus, thanks to the new algorithms I should be able to implement similar ones for any other objects / obstacles / enemies I manage to implement in next 8 hrs or so! 😉
win32 available here for anyone curious as to its workings / progress.
MinMo is my entry into the LD11 – Minimalist Theme compo:
Update:
Two win32 versions are now available, a fullscreen and a windowed. No other changes were made to gameplay or bugs. The resolution is 1024×768. I recommend the fullscreen version for a more immersive experience. 😉
Fullscreen win32 available here (2.3MB)
Windowed 1024×768 win32 available here (2.3MB)
full zip with win32 exe and source here (3.5MB)
I’m hoping to post a linux version / instructions soon too.
The goal is to get from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. Each time you do the world will advance one level. Each level brings more flowers and enemies to overcome.
You play as a character with two forms. “Min” – who is thin, vulnerable and snakelike. “Mo” – who is an invulnerable and immovable gelatinous mass.
You can only move around when you are Min but if you are falling off of a block you can transform into Mo to crush enemies below you. If you happen to be cornered by an ememy as Min, you can transform into Mo to let them pass by safely. You can only get hit by the enemies once or the game ends. You can continue though so never fear!
The game world consists of rising and falling blocks that also play the music of the game in time to their movements. There are little flowers that grow from time to time that you can collect for points.
This was created with ruby and the incredible gosu game library.
I used the awesome sfxr for all game sounds too!
Bitmaps created in Tile Studio after some initial concept art inspiration in Corel Draw.
I finished this with 3 minutes left in the deadline. That means that I didn’t have a chance to play it that much to tune for fun. It is functional and seems stable. The player crushing enemies collision detection could be a little better for sure and the levels could advance in a more interesting way. All in all I am very happy with having completed this project in such a short time. I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it under the deadline the past 4 hours or so leading up to the end so I am glad that I actually managed to pull something off. I’ll post a post mortem later perhaps. I can’t wait to check out all the other entries! Good luck and congrats to everyone who participated!
This will be my second time participating in the insanity that is Ludum Dare. I was here for LD11 – Minimalist before. Since people are posting a few thoughts about lessons learned or at least things to be cognizant of during the competition I felt I’d add my own as well:
My personal quest this time will be to leave a LOT more time to actually make the game ‘fun’. I didn’t do very well on pacing last time around and while I was really happy with the art, style and environmental aspects of my ‘game’ it really fell short on play testing time and game play.
As a practical example of what I mean, most of the negative feedback my ‘final’ deadline entry received over the week of voting / rating I had already resolved on my own within hours of the submission deadline. This of course couldn’t be uploaded as the final entry being past the close of competition. Point being, given time to play it (which I honestly hadn’t really had a chance to do very much of) a lot of issues become quite obvious. If I had paced even a few more hours of actual playing time into the competition schedule I believe that my entry would have been a lot more fun to play for others.
That is what I will be keeping in my mind for LD13. Make sure to play your own game or have thought out the game play as early as possible. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the polish of art, style, look and feel and forget that a game should have a game in it and actually be fun to play.
Good luck everyone, I can’t wait to see all the entries!
I will be using Ruby and the Gosu Gamedev Library developed by Julian Raschke (who participates here at LD sometimes) for my language and codelibs just like on my LD11 – Minimalist entry. I’ll probably use sfxr for the sound. I may try bazaar for source control (i’m more used to subversion but the syntax is similar enough.) I’ve got Tile Studio for my sprites. I’ve got audacity for any sound work I may need. I think that is about it.
Here is my workspace too. Crummy photo I know. Also, I’ve moved recently and this is the best area I could really cobble together in time for the compo.
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
I’ve been working like mad since my last post at trying to mock up some CoMuTor animation tiles to have something to work with the soon to be written game logic. I always forget how long animation takes and am hoping that these placeholders won’t become permanent as far the deadline goes…. we shall see!
Here is a detail of my Tile Studio CoMuTor project:
Here is the larger image of even more tiles:
I have to draw some final frames of a CoMuTor attack where you reach down and fling cars up into the air and/or a smash attack as well.
Well, as the clock ticks down and I find myself with less than 22 hours left in the competition I am trying to keep my spirits AND energy up. While I am pleased enough with the work I’ve done, I have worked much more slowly than I wanted. Not sure what this will mean for the adventures of CoMuTor but only time will tell.
Here is a “tech” demo if anyone wants to check out my progress so far. You can basically move CoMuTor all around and jump and perform his flip car attack though sadly there are no cars yet.
And here is the screenshot for the sake of completeness:
Tags: comutor, demo, exe, screenshot
CoMuTor finally has three types of vehicles. Given time constraints I am really simplifying the art style so that I will have some small hope of making this a game by the deadline. I am also looking for gameplay that will fit within the deadline at this point too.
My new simple plan is that vehicles move right to left and that you can attack them and jump on them. I’m not sure yet how I will work the aspect of them running into you. Will that hurt you if you aren’t flip attacking them? Questions questions….
Here is a link to the updated post compo version that will stay current. ** NEW **
Here is link to win32 binaries only final compo version
Here is link to Mac build of compo version (thanks to jlnr!) ** NEW **
Here is link to full source and media archive of compo version
Gameplay:
You are a monster who has decided you will take out your aggression on the morning commuters. You can crush cars and SUVs with abandon as long as you land squarely on them with your jump move. You must be mindful of the dangerous GAS trucks! Keep away from those at all costs and let them safely leave the screen. Every car or SUV that escapes your wrath and flees the left of the screen costs you the same amount of negative points as if you had crushed them with a fatal jump move. After each vehicle is destroyed it’s inhabitants flee in panic. You can chase them down and eat them. Don’t let vehicles run into you though as this will also cost you score as well. The game speed will continue to increase with every 10 vehicles destroyed. Since you are an invincible monster you are merely playing for a positive score until you retire from your activities.
Managed to cram some form of “game” into it but it definitely didn’t turn out how I meant it given all the triage and feature cuts I had to make both in programming and art. I had an awesome time though just the same. Can’t wait to play everyone’s entries!
First of all, thanks so much to everyone who left feedback to me in the ratings area. I have taken a bunch of the suggestions that people made and have worked more on improving CoMuTor in the past 2 weeks. Here is the latest work in progress of a post compo version of CoMuTor. The readme file contains all the changes that I made so far based on my own and others feedback. I welcome further feedback in the comments on this post for anyone that liked CoMuTor enough to try and play it again. I’m just having fun working on aspects of polishing and modifying this silly little game. I look forward to more Ludum Dares!!
CoMuTor v1.1 – Post Compo win32
Changes from compo version:
– added visual score feedback and level indicators
– added 3 minute time limit
– made it harder to eat people
– points scale with faster/smaller vehicles
– rebalanced point system
– rebalanced timing / car release system
– vehicles have different speeds now
– added people to vehicle sprites
– broke out car and suv sprite body for better coloring system
– crushing gas trucks no longer counts towards crush count
– vehicles running into you no longer spawn people
– adjusted menu instructions to reflect new changes