… and finally decide to write my own post here, as everybody and his sister also writes a short message on the fact that he or she is participating.

My first ludum dare. Tools? Well just simple Scite as the editor, using C++ with SDL. Gimp and Inkscape for graphics. As I am pretty new to game development, I don’t think to manage music and sounds yet. So I focus on proper game mechanics and a fun experience.

I will use some of my older codes as reference, but nothing too spectacular. All derived from Lazyfoos tutorials.

Here is a current screenshot of my game. It’s a shmup with some quirks I did not see yet in another game. At least not in this outcome.

We’ll see if it get’s any more beautiful or fun. Right now it’s at least funny.

Shmup'em'up

Well, for my very first Ludum Dare, and not a lot of games already in my portfolio, and the time and my beginners status… bla bla bla… long story short, my game just happened to call me awesome.

Well if that’s not something to share with you.

Yeah it's space

Yeah I know exactly what you think. I went with space. Duh…. I for myself think it is okay at least.

Oh and it’s only compiled for Linux due to a lack of windows. Hope this is enough for the compo though.

As soon as this post here is finished. And actually, as soon as I get the guts to submit it. It really is in a possible finished state. You see an intro screen. I don’t get to see major bugs, just them little flaws that nobody should bother with anyways.

You can get points and die. Yay, what more does a game need?

The fun idea was to make random generated enemies. Because I have 4 major enemy parts (that is the body, a shield, the throttle mechanism and the weapons), having 5 custom possibilities of each, that ends up in 625 different enemies.

And the idea was that you could reach up to 2500 points due to the fact that each type of enemy leaves up to 4 different particles that need to be collected.

Did not get to that part though. Let’s see if i can manage to fix that and make it more like the fist idea in the next weeks.

Timelapse video is also on its way.

Yay, I am proud to have finished my first Ludum Dare in time, with a finished product and a timelapse video I just can’t stop watching.

So I finally managed to edit up the timelapse video. I wanted to make an audio comment and actually had two tries on that. But as my voice sounds face-punchingly dull and boring, I decided against it, ending up just adding some royalty free music I found by searching the net.

So click here to see my timelapse.

So this will be my very first second LD competition. After a more or less bad outcome at my first LD, LD19 that is, I want to at least get a better placement than the last one.

What I’m gonna do will mostly depend on the theme, but I am like 90ish percent sure that this time it will NOT be a shmup. Too much shmups on my hand right now. Plus I really dig to at least once be making a decent platformer.

So the lang will most likely be SDL, C++ with no other frameworks. Wait, if I manage to finish my simple framework then it will be this one. If not, then it’ll be everything from scratch. And if i really use my framework it will definitely be released in source here too, obeying the rules for the competition.

On tools it will be Gimp and Inkscape for graphics, CLI for compiling and for taking screenshots for my timelapse, and my smartphone for taking food shots. Hope I’ll make it on my brand new MacBook pro.

As I still had no experience with sounds and music in games it will most likely be a quite game. Maybe I’ll get a flash though and start with musagi and sfxr before the competition, then it could get some sounds. But that is not likely.

So yeah… looking forward.

I whined and screamed for over a month now about someone making me a shibby LD20 wallpaper. But just nobody caved in. So I caved in myself and found myself a cool tool to create myself a neato wallpaper for the LD20 event.

Here you go with a 1280 x 960 type of the wallpaper. Somebody need something different? Well just let it scale to fit the screen. I think, for my 5 minutes of time i did a decent job and it’s enough to get around.

Obeying to the rules I have to release my scaffolding code that I will use in the compo.

So here you can download the XCode project with all the scaffolding code that I will use. If you want to compile it, make sure you have SDL, SDL_image, SDL_ttf and SDL_mixer installed in your /Library/Frameworks folder. Also make sure to undo the music loading in the constructor of the class, because I did not want to add the 8MB test music file to save bandwith.

Other than that this is just plain simple C++ scaffolding code with a basic game loop, simple image loading helper functions, initialized everything basic to directly begin with the main game. Took me 3 hours to build up and it’s free to use for whatever reason you have.

Here are some images of my bat-cave. I work in the kitchen on a high-chair and table. There is a big fridge for all my needs, a huge selection of beverages, and some leftover food from tonights dinner.

Looking forward to the competition. As it starts at 4am in the morning, I’ll go to sleep for now and come back at 3am to prepare last things.

My computer

Leftover food

Beverages

It’s 5:35 am now and I got a little hungry. Now that is what i’m talking about. Yummy, delish and filled with veggies and wonder. Yum yum

Yummy

Man, looking at all the other screenshots on here I feel kinda embarrassed with my progress. It took me a long time to have a really crappy animation of my character. And yet I still have to build the platformer.

Even the level generation is very bad. And let’s just not talk about my jump behaviour. First time for that, but this is really bad. Well, let’s see if I can get it to behave better from now.

Next step: Random level generation

So I really did manage to submit my game last night. Who would have thought.

Tonight I’ll be doing the porting work, because up to now there is only a OSX build up there. I’ll port to Linux and Windows.

Also further post mortem, timelapse video and the like will follow, so stay tuned. There is still so much work to do to really finalize the submission with all the porting and editing to do. Also there is rating, don’t forge the rating.

But for now I gotta work my daily job as superman. Looking forward to going back to my secret identity of Clark Kent at night and create shibby games.

I finally managed to port my compo entry to windows. Phew, what a fight.

So here you can find my entry and the link to the windows version. Hopefully a linux version will follow soon too.
But first, the next step will be to finalize the timelapse.

Well, I finally made some progress in finishing up all my main chores for the competition.

That being the port to windows and finally uploading my timelapse video. Check out the game page for the windows version and the timelapse.

Oh and as I heard there were some problems with the windows version, please let me know if you also encounter any problems running my game, so I can try to fix it somehow.

Yeap. I’m totally in. And finally I found the time to declare it to the world through here. That is, i just finished my basic scaffold code, that just consists of the base flixel classes to start gaming in.

So yeah, as mentioned, I’ll be using flixel in flash for my third Ludum Dare competition. This time i’m in it to win it. Not competition wise, but more of self improvement wise.

So yeah, also making a timelapse, and will have a lot of fun. Also, I totally look forward to the keynote as my son and me will hopefully make a great appearance. Good luck to all the participants.

Edit: Oh yeah, totally forgot to link to my scaffold code.

I am really done with my game. For the third time I dared to make a game, and for the third time I submitted it. But every single time it feels exciting anew.

The floor is made of LAVA

So here is a screen of my game. As promised I really made my Moustache Chick. She is real and she is awesome. Go moustache chick.

Also I used my theme of hearts, the floor is made of LAVA. And, as you can already see in the screenshot, there is one hell of a lava floor in my game. Even worse, the lava level grows steadily. But that’s just “Moustache chick in LAVA mayhem” being itself.

So check out my site here to play it. Oh, and while you’re already there, play it. It’s one tough game but has 8 static levels. And from there on it is one endless auto generated hell like you have last seen in Diablo. Good luck

So over at my blog I wrote up a blog post again about the packaging up of my gift for the Ludum Dare christmas gift exchange 2011.

Check it out here.

And I hope more people are posting up about the gift exchange. It is a lot of fun.

Yes, again I’m in. It all started at LD19, and the craze did not end ever since. I’m in it and will stay for a lot of upcoming LDs.

Using AS3 and Flixel again. This is gonna be exciting. Got the weekend off, made an arrangement with the family, so I have my time for that. Also an awesome playlist with the game music bundle.

Exciting =)

I just finished preparing my meal for the weekend. It’s polish pickle soup, the easy edition.

Just cut a lot of potatoes, then grind some polish pickles (the salty ones), cook the potatoes with some stock, then after 25 mintues of cooking, add the grinded pickles, cook another 10 minutes. Add some pickle water if you like it more sour and salty. I add a lot. Then in the end, put in some sour cream. Ready done soup and tasty.

With potatoes

Yummy pickle soup

I worked for around 15 hours on that thing today. Does not resemble a proper game yet, still needs the main storyline and all. Also some things to actually do other than wandering around. Let’s see if I can make that happen tomorrow.

Here’s a screenie of my progress so far.

No I'm not ugly