This is my first Ludum Dare. I already considered participating LD 19 and 20 but I didn’t really have the time back then.

I will code the game in C, using a custom library you can get here. It’s rather big and messy but of course no game logic included.
For the graphics I will use Paint.net and for the sounds sfxr. I also will record the weekend with chronolapse.

Good luck everyone and I hope you are not as nervous as I am.

So far, I have got nearly everything working that I had planned for the game yesterday. Now I just have to mix it all together and turn it into something that feels like a game and design a few levels. And maybe also improve the art..

First screen is from yesterday before I went to bed. Second one is from just a few minutes ago after I found a better way to get the theme into the game.

I had such a blast during LD #21 that I feel obligated to also participate in LD #22.
Sadly, I am not sure if I will have the time to finish a game this weekend as RL will keep me busy. Nevertheless it’s worth at least a try.

Tools that I will use:

Language: C
IDE: Visual Studio 2008
Lib/Engine: A custom library (uses OpenGL for graphics) You can download it here
Gfx: Paint.net
Audio: sfxr and FL Studio
Misc: Recording the whole process with Chronolapse.

Good luck everyone!

Time to post some screenshots!

The first screenshot shows a part of the 30 seconds intro which took me about 3 hours. The second screenshot is part of the actual gameplay. You are a small worm-like something swimming around in an endless ocean of nothing. There is no objective right now, swimming around is all you can do. I am trying to stay away from ‘collect xxx to progress’ or ‘avoid yyy to not die’ but until now I was not able to come up with something different that is fun.

Less than 7 hours left and I still don’t have any objective in the game. But there is at least some sort of gameplay now.

Most of the time I spent (or maybe wasted) with fine-tuning different effects in game – I am happy with the graphics now. I also created a small soundtrack. It’s good if you consider the fact that I suck at making music.
If you want to try it yourself, here is what I got so far: Download

My game is very very strange.

Basically, I made a long tunnel like dungeon and you have to flee from a huge earthworm. Sadly, it still feels very boring because it is very linear. I need to think up a few more challenges for the dungeon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 8:13 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This is my fourth Ludum Dare and I am really looking forward to it. This time I want to try something risky and focus on innovation and maybe complexity instead of going the safe way by making something that I am already familiar with. In other words: I will use this LD to prototype an unique idea I have yet to come up with (depends on the theme, of course).

As usual my tools are:

Language: C (using VS2008)
Libs: A custom framework/engine (get it here)
Graphics: Paint.net
Audio: FL Studio
Misc: Chronolapse

The bad thing is that the theme will be announced at 3am local time, so I will probably go to sleep right at the start of the compo. On the contrary, coding through the whole night is not an good idea.

I wish everyone good luck and a bug-less weekend 😉

Now I am starting to get interactivity into the simulation. It slowly turns into a game.
I added ‘carnivores’, they don’t evolve like the normal creatures do, but they act as an additional force for the evolution process.

I am also working on the UI to control various environmental effects.

Extreme case of overfeeding:

My eyes…

After a late start I am still working on the basic graphics and core logic. My original plan was to do pure 2d graphics. But once I was done I realized that it looks very boring and also a bit strange. Because of that I added a 3d view and kept the old 2d view as a kind of minimap.

Here are some screenshots:

Rotating a 2d image in 3d space helps making it look better

Added 3d-effect
The colored blocks are ‘alive’ and move

What I currently have is some kind of sandbox evolution simulator. The white blocks are spawned randomly and represent food. The colored cubes are the ‘creatures’ that move around and can eat the white blocks. If they ate enough they will duplicate. Every time a new creature is spawned it inherits and slightly changes its behavior randomly (mutation). Each creature is actually a very very small program running in a simple VM. To accomplish random mutation I just insert, change or remove random code.
Very interesting to watch, but doesn’t really feel like a game yet.

I spent the last 3 hours working on the main menu. After working practically 15 hours non-stop on the game, I better get some sleep. Not sure if I will run into time problems tomorrow. There aren’t many features left on the todo list but I always come up with the best ideas in the last few hours. Oh, and I still need a good soundtrack.

it is even animated

I had a nice plan for today, add the remaining 3-4 features and then submit the game. However, after letting people beta-test the game and testing it extensively myself I noticed there is still a lot of stuff that could be improved. My ToDo list is now growing instead of shrinking and 3 1/2 hours to go. I will take it easy nevertheless and just continue to add the important stuff. We will see how far I get.

on the screen: deadly worms and creatures avoiding them. UI is also most likely finished.