Still very much in dev, but here’s some screen dumps of my game ‘Escape the flood’

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5896

Twitter: digital_glue

 

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I’ve just uploaded my final version of my game for this competition, well done to everyone.. It’s been great to see such a good spirit and it’s been good to be part of it for my first time here.

 

http://www.digital-glue.com/competitions/ld21/

 

Enjoy ^_^

When the LD48 v.21 competition started I was on the Loas border taking a short break with my girlfriend. I contemplated going home to Chiang Mai but insisted to myself that cutting my holiday short would probably mean that I was inevitably going to get killed and I’d spend the next six months trying to Escape the wrath of my better half. So, I figured I’d leave it and enter next time. Usually when I want to do something, nothing much stops me.

I traveled from Chiang Khong on the border down to Chiang Mai, Thailand. A journey that took about 7 hours (4 of which I was chatting to a nice Swedish guy with a questionable hair piece) Anyway, I arrived back in Chiang Mai, got a taxi home and sat chatting to my work mate. The competition was well underway, so I didn’t think about it too much. I went over to my computer to see if anyone else had submitted games and couldn’t believe, there was a rook of entries already and I saw the keyword… That was it, 14 hours to go on the board… I need to make something. 😮

I needed an idea so I threw a couple around… “You need to escape from the government”, “You are a rioter, and need to escape from the police”, “You are dead and need to escape the afterlife”… you know, the non-sense ideas (Maybe the last one isn’t so non-sense) ^_^

A few weeks ago, the same friend bought an xbox, the first game he bought for it was “From Dust”, a game I’d found through @photonstorm via twitter and keenly showed my friend. (I’m still yet to play it, although I have seen the gameplay). When thinking about escape games, it jumped into my mind and even though it was demanding to write a prototype of such a game in Flash, I had a full 14 hours… 😉

The result is here: http://bit.ly/pCvKDo

OK… The rights and the wrongs.

RIGHTS

• It’s visually quite impressive for Flash
• I got more that a single level in
• Its nice to play with as a sandbox
• The characters have different walk speeds and recovery rates
• The game is quite small due to some procedurally generated environments using fractals
• Environments look organic
• The point and click mechanism is nice for a 3D game in Flash

WRONGS

• The game is unbalanced for the requirements of this competition
• I’m getting feedback that the controls are quite difficult
• I’m getting feedback that the CPU usage on some machines is high
• The camera is not bound and can pass through the terrain
• Level design is generally poor
• Game mechanics are lacking
• UI is poor, because my FlashBuilder trial ran out and I would usually have used that

All in all, I’m happy…because I was able to build a working game in 26 hours (remember the 12 hour extension? Yes, I needed it all- no sleep for 35+ hours)!! I had super fun with the hallucinating finish where pixels were moving and I was thinking…”Hang on, I didn’t code that in??”)- I loved the spirit of the competition.

WHAT I’LL DO DIFFERENT

Yes, I have the bug so hopefully LD22 will see an entrr from me next time and I’ll be prepared… In fact, that’s my main tactic, organization. Get my workflow for all game elements ready and use the full term. I think I’ll probably prepare a screen cast since I saw some of Notches screencast and it’s probably good to read back to see if there are any constructive comments within the flame flood. Anyway, thank you LD for a fun time and see you at LD22.

Peace

Well, I’ve had a good sleep, my girlfriend is grabbing supplies. I’m still deciding on my tools and probably will be into the competition, depending on the theme!! But I’m IN! My general tools will include:

– Flash Develop
– Flare3D
– Blender
– My own keyboard for sound
– FL Studio

Good luck everyone, bring on the 48 hours of FUN <3

Well…. I have my structure and 3D engine working (No I didn’t make the model haha)

OK, here was my day in a nutshell:

• Added some layers and tweens to a AS3 mobile App, when I tried to resize them to the stage size, they disappeared.
• Changed to a Flex app because relative resizing not working
• Got Flare3D and their 3DS Max Plugin
• Got 3DS Max 2013 but plugin doesn’t work
• Got 3DS Max 2010, the plugin works but the color settings kill the models so I cant’s see them
• Started using Collada with Blender
• Embedded Flare3D in the app
• A conflict between the Mobile App and Flare3D, camera movement now doesn’t work
• Bubbling events to the stage or stage references doesn’t work
• I’ll use the accelerometer anyway so not a big problem
• Import my Blender model to Flare3D
• Textures and materials not showing

That was my day yesterday! Anyway… I was going to upload a video from my phone, but guess what. It doesn’t work, it’s stopped at 26% and keeps waiting to retry!

[EDIT]
I’m actually going to declare myself out and take my lovely girlfriend to lunch! This experience has confirmed the need for a decent 3D engine in flash and has furthered my motivation for Zest3D.

 

Below is the great game idea that my girlfriend came up with and anyone might use for inspiration:

A small universe of tiny worlds, each world has resources, but the small world size means that resource distribution is bad to say the least. There’s a mini world which is mostly water, one with all the soil, another has all the annual plats etc etc. It’s your job to travel in your space rocket and gather resources from each of these world and deliver them to the residents that are needy of particular resources. For your efforts the residents replay you in love points and help you to build new parts for your space rocket meaning that you can travel further, find new resources and become the explorer you always wanted to be!

Enjoy the competition guys I can’t wait to play all of your great games 😀

Yes, this time I’m definitely in. I’m going to be at the UK, Manchester – Madlab Hackerspace

Tools:

IDE: FlashDevelop
GFX: Paint Shop Pro
SFX: Milky Tracker

Good luck every one!
http://www.plugin.io

What a great time I’ve had this time around on LD24! I’m tired, have a wicked headache but it’s been worth it. I’ve spent my weekend at the Manchester UK Meetup– MadLab and it was nice to mingle with some of the guys local to me. Only a few of them were working on Ludum Dare games, but we were all inspiring each other and there was a great creative atmosphere.

I decided to use FlashPunk for the first time (another learn on the job that I always seem to manage), It’s actually pretty good though. I managed to get XML data parsing from OGMO Editor and the result is the first evolutionary phase of my game effort, imaginatively named “Evolution” lol… I know, I know.

I started going down various layers of game possibilities that would scaffold in terms of development complexity, but after playing the simplest, I simply enjoyed the retro fun and decided that I would keep the simple mechanics and enhance the retro graphics, provide the first chunk of gameplay and then add 60 or so levels after the event.

Anyway, here are some screenshots and you can play the first 9 levels of the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5896

 

Gary Paluk
Twitter: @plugin_io
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/plugin.io
Web: http://www.plugin.io

 

Having a great time looking at this years games, it’s astonishing that there are over 1400 games available for people to play. That’s over double the entire Sega Master System title releases during the lifetime of the console.

If you participated in the Jam, CONGRATULATIONS Your games are awesome and now I’m off to vote!

…and…you can play my game HERE