Hey Everybody!

A friend of mine is organizing an “art game” exhibit in Toronto called “START”. Here are some details:

START

Sept. 13 – 17
8am – 10pm daily
www.thestartshow.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157656320916123

The goal of the event is to promote “art games” created in Toronto and beyond. The plan is to let visitors play a variety of unique games, and let them decide for themselves what is art. This is the first START, and we’re hoping it evolves into a yearly event. START will be held at the Ontario College of Art & Design which is affiliated with The Art Gallery of Ontario.
http://www.ocad.ca
http://www.ago.net

Everything takes place in one very large room, traditionally used to display paintings. In that room we’ll have 5 PC’s projecting games onto the walls for people to play – one projector is HUGE. The room will be impressive. Visitors can drop by anytime (open daily until 10:00pm) including Thursday (the Gala). We’re expecting hundreds of students daily (school will have just resumed), with 2 “gala” nights that will attract an older audience.

Due to budget and time constraints, we will be showing PC indie games only.

I gave him a list of artsy games off the top of my head (with some help from IRC), but LD is so big now, I realize I could be missing some real gems.

So if you know of any Ludum Dare games that meet the criteria of “art game”, ones you created or adore, please nominate them in the comments (one game per post, and give a nod to nominations you agree with). If you can find a link to the competition page, or a blog post here, that would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

going to announce date, as well as themes and rules all at once, to make a nice change

• theme: Greatest Fear.
• rule: Collaborate with someone who has never worked on a game before.

you don’t *have* to work with someone else, it’s optional, but encouraged. and collaboration can be of any level, as long as someone (or thing, I won’t discriminate against pets, zoo animals or alien encounters of the game kind) contributes something, be it level design, a doodle on paper you scan and use as a sprite, photos of them for character frames, or writes the dialogue, or voice acts… whatever.

and due to the nature of this rule, these contributions can be made at any time, before, during, or after the weekend of the mini (and I’m super lenient with time anyway, so feel free to take your own 48 hour-ish chunk out of September as you please for putting it all together, the weekend date is mostly so if you want to work alongside others its then).

• the date: 3am GMT/UTC 25th September.

but like I say, its loose so do whatever suits you.

also judging entries; I know some people like to have minis with a round of judging, I wont be having that, and it’s not up for discussion.

also also, it’s my hope that people will explore what their real greatest fear is through the games they make during this mini, but you are welcome to interpret the theme how you like, or disregard it all-together.

any questions about the rules or anything just comment on this post, but as a general rule anything you want to do, I’m cool with

I’m very excited for the Mini-LD. As I said in the announcement thread, I will be working with my stuffed fox, Charles Feynman.

He is partly there for moral support and partly for me to bounce ideas off of. (I have some good ideas when I just sit and chat with him. Having someone/something that just sits and listens to you is great for brainstorming.)

I will be facing a fear of mine this LD: I will be making a side-scroller using pixel graphics. I’m terrified of making pixel graphics as I’m rather bad at it. That’s my task here.

It will likely be pretty simple, but it’ll get the job done.

I’m starting out by doing a warmup game using (As I’m doing in the Mini-LD) GIMP for graphics, sfxr for sound, Flex+FlashPunk for code, and I’ll find something for music.

For those who are curious, my warmup game is a side-scrolling hack ‘n slash about a fighter (One of two playable characters) trying to retrieve a Valuable Treasure from a dungeon, fighting goblins and orcs to get to it.

With that, I’m going to get to work!

Heya, just posted my game on GameJolt!
here’s the link:
http://gamejolt.com/open-source/games/arcade/afterdark/3418/

It’s the post-compo edition.

On another note, good luck to everyone with the results!

Looking for more compo fun?

Here’s a really cool contest: You have seven days out of the month of September to build a game that is “NEVERENDING”. Can you build a game that is infinitely playable, and always crowd pleasing? For more info, check out The Experimental Gameplay Project

If you are a demoscener or love javascript html5 canvas stuff, there’s a nifty “elite” coder style compo called JS1k, where you have 1024 bytes total for your game. Entries are due in one week. Some of the demos totally blew me away – there’s even a Zelda clone!

Finally, if you are a serious contender and can afford the $100 entrance fee, you can compete for $100,000 in the Indie Game Challenge.

I’m always on the lookout for new fun compos, so if you know of any more, please post a comment and let me know. Thanks LDers!

So yeah, I finished a post-compo version of my jam thing. I’m quite happy with it, but beware, it’s really REALLY hard.

BWOOP
download

== CONTROLS == (These are explained in-game, too)
Arrow keys = move
S = jump and confirm
D = pick up and throw
D + Down = put down
D + up = throw upwards
R = restart
Esc = Quit
Note that the speed of thrown objects changes depending on your own momentum while throwing. That is, throwing stuff while walking makes them fly farther.

I’ve been tinkering with my LD 18 game over the past week and a half. The main things I’ve added are online leaderboards, background graphics and better in game help.

It seemed like the main problems with my game were confusion over how to play, very bare gameplay unrelated to the ’story’ mentioned in the readme and misunderstandings over the goals. There are now several pages of in game help explaining the mechanics, with pictures, that will hopefully clear up how the vacuum mechanic works. I’ve added some nice tile mapped backgrounds and an intro ‘cutscene’ which should indicate that you have to defend the area beyond the left of the screen. Finally, it’s basically a score based endurance game so the leaderboard should emphasise that part of it.

Astrovax also turned out quite addictive, hopefully the leaderboard will make it more so. >:D

The new version can be found at astrovax.moop.org.uk.

Wrote a blog post making excuses as to why I didn’t finish my Ludum Dare entry here:

http://hobbygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/ludum-dare-18-and-pyweek-11.html

tl;dr version:
“Turns out having a toddler and an infant to take care of is pretty time consuming.”

Why yes, I am shameless enough to blame it on my kids. Mostly only had code, but I did take this picture of our brainstorming session:

Maybe next time. Great job everybody!

I’m going to work on a iPad/iPhone version of my Ludum Dare entry and had a friend help with some art brainstorming. Here are a few drafts. What do you think?

Current look: (Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2612 )

New drafts:

Main character: The idea is to drag the monster around by moving the eye.

Updated versions of the two robots already in the game

New robot concepts: Big slow robot that can take a few hits. Slow hovering robot that shoots with smaller robots. Some powerup!

I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

Some people have been complaining that my entry was too hard. Perhaps it is,but I was playing on it tonight and I managed to get to wave 9 of 10, almost completed it!

The ranking system is definitely all over the place, I will need to take a look at it once the competition is over

Well I’m been putting this off for a while but I might as well do it now.

This past LD was quite the challenge for me, especially the theme, I found myself unmotivated by the fact that the theme more or less dictated most of the gameplay, thus more or less disallowing me to go about my usual “wing-it” strategy. I had this idea for a game pop into my head the night before the compo as I was about to fall asleep, and I was really hoping for “Hidden depths” or whatever to win so that I could use it. My mistake was probably getting so excited about that one idea, and as a result, when I got the actual theme I was too disappointed to bother looking further into the theme. I went for a walk and got an idea as to how I would make my game concept work with the theme, and got really excited. The idea was that your character would get parts from enemies and would then craft weapons out of said parts. The idea quickly died as I realized I’d be spending my whole 48/72 hours fighting the inventory system. Once again moping about, I noticed Hamumu had posted some of his ideas for anyone to use, and, desperate as I was I read away.

One of his ideas, which I don’t remember at this time, sparked an idea in my mind: Have turrets shoot circuit boards that power electric gate things! It wasn’t much, but I figured I could cram it into my game concept from the night before. And then I started work on D3SCENT.

It was interesting to make a game that focused on storyline first, game mechanics second, as I almost always do the opposite, “Oh, here’s the engine, time to staple on a couple lines of humorous dialogue”. I quickly realized that for D3SCENT to be a success I’d need to focus on story first, which ended up being true, once I had the story in place I was able to create the ambiance and world it called for, and meant I didn’t have to go back and tweak the whole world to make it fit with the storyline.

I’m very happy with my end result, heck, it got featured on Byetjacker, but I’m tired of fighting with and for gamemaker. I should be getting flash CS5 sometime soon, so I’ll try working with that a bit. Though I’ll probably have to stick with GM for the next LD or two until I’m comfortable with flash.

I have found a few game sites with my Ludum Dare entry, Money Thief as one of their games. They have published this without my consent, and I’m not sure how to get them to take it down.

A quick Google search for “Money Thief game” shows at least two sites with it featured as one of their games. The only site I’ve actually uploaded it to are Kongregate and my own site.

What do you guys recommend? I’m going to go ahead and site-lock my entry and my version on Kongregate, but how can I get these other guys to take it down?

Since there was such a good response to my LD#18 entry entitled Infiltrator, I’ve been working on-and-off on a post-compo edition. It’s nearly done.

A list of what I have done so far can be found by clicking “read more.” (For now, just a raw dump of my changelog summaries. I’ll put together a more complete list of what’s new once I am done.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello folks. I’ve been tinkering with my entry for a while now, and I’m ready to release a second post-competition version. This is a much more substantial release than the previous, and contains a number of changes which greatly alter the way it plays. The flow between offense and defense still isn’t quite the way I want it to be, so I’ll continue development for at least a few more days. Feedback would be very much appreciated.

Current version: http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/bubble_tag_current

Changes include:

• Defensive walls
• Boulders which supply resources (for repairing walls)
• Bubbles now act as shields
• Bubble size reflects current health- this acts as a HUD-less indicator of health. It also means that the more health we have, the easier we are to hit.
• Part count is now capped- destroy the core of a larger enemy base to upgrade
• Lots of tuning

I would also like to thank HybridMind, who helped test and had some good suggestions.