Finaly I’m done… everything works for the best I hope =]

I worked mostly on graphics, luckily I’m quite fast with drawings and my tablet helped me a lot to make things faster and easier =]

about the game, I didn’t have time to add sounds or music or make a decent menus and intro which I planed… instead I decided that I will go for polishing the game abit… I made 7 levels with bonus levels anda final boss =]

features

• 7 levels with bonus levels
• 3 enemy types + 1 boss + special creatures
• 3 attack typs + 1 super attack
• bonuses + diamonds

Download

Download Akin Revenge

Screenshots

Wow… I’m still shaking from the excitement of that final crunch.  I worked on the game pretty much all day today only breaking for necessary bodily functions.  Got it submitted less than one minute before the deadline.  And I’m really pleased with how it came out!  Yesterday I hated it, but today everything seemed to click together like a jigsaw puzzle.

And I had a BLAST making the music.  I recorded and edited it all in Audacity.  I performed it on a little quarter-size Denver acoustic guitar I bought a couple weeks ago for a camping trip ($100 CAD).  I also used a Bluesband harmonica (just a cheap little thing).  As for the microphone… it’s just a crappy $40 Logitech thing from Future Shop I bought for voicechat in online games.  I uploaded the soundtrack as a separate ZIP file as well, for anyone who’s interested: http://mattmakesgames.com/soundtracks/BrokenCaveRobotSoundtrack.zip

Overall I’m happy with all the weird little ideas I got to try out in this game.  The first two days consisted of me dumping every idea I had into the game – today was me sewing it all together.

I was really busy so I didn’t upload my latest food photos.  Here goes!

An orange and Dr. Pepper pre-lunch snack.

And then I totally forgot to take a picture of my In’n'Out burger, but I guess pretty much everyone can guess what it looked like.  Here’s dinner though:

Nom'd pasta with peas and chicken.

I  submitted the game an hour ago, but I forgot to post on the blog!

Play it via the browser <a href=”http://www.deadpanda.com/lj/ld15submit.html”>HERE</a>, or grab the download (Windows or Mac): <a href=”http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview&uid=472″>HERE</a>

I’m very excited because this is my first successful ludumdare entry. My last two attempts crashed and burned, and this was pretty close to doing the same. I was able to scrape it with a few rough edges and submit it on time.

So I was just beginning to have fun. Here’s a vector type of miner race. But before anything I’ll represent you my accomplishments in game development.

-In highschool (about 7 years from now) I programmed a snake game, it included a rabbit with basic run-away algorithm aside from apples.
-One or two months ago I made a shoot’em up type of thing with pygame which you are controlling a plane and there are two monsters in screen and background is scrolling.
-And now I made this.

So I hope you won’t blame me now Strength lies in knowing your weaknesses, they say. I knew I couldn’t try anything more complicated. At least I learned some basic things.

So what I present you is a miner racing game (where one racer rides the mine tracks and the other, well, the ceiling) with real fake 2d physics and polynomial interpolation as a track editor. Cars act like roller coaster, they can’t leave the rails. Did I mentioned no sprites?

So first, what I was able to pull;

- If I had 2d physics, I needed 2d collision detection too (even though pygame can collide some stuff). So I made a fake 2d physics engine. It just calculates the impact of gravitational force and then everything is 1d. Still looks 2d.

And what doesn’t work as expected but still better than nothing

- I wanted to let the user enter an array of 2d checkpoints and then create a track from it by polynomial interpolation. Bad thing is I used Lagrange polynomials. I wanted to use them since they didn’t need any slope information. But midway I wanted to have horizontal start and finish lines. I should have gone with something smoother but I don’t really remember much of interpolation and I didn’t had time to read again.

- Appearently zooming in and out of a surface is expensive especially if the surface is big enough to hold your whole track. Something can be done if drawn polynomial tracks are optimised in some way, like rendering on-the-fly with level of detail. Still camera can track the arithmetic mean of 2 cars.

Things I would have added if I had some more time

- Fake collision detection in 1d. I was planning to have obstacles on road, throwing molotov cocktails at each other, rocks falling down(can’t think of a cavern game without this). And even changing tracks (like jumping up to the track above and hit the other car on the back)

- Calculating stuff so that I could tell if the tracks are colliding or seperated too much. Setting minimum margin so that the guys’ head don’t collide. Compare lengths of tracks. Putting vector rail woods every 10 unit and vector lights hanging down from upper track every 100 units. Simple calculus stuff like that.

- The racers (flowers on the pots) would have physics too. Like ragdolls, their heads would go back as you accelerate and hit their head to the front of the car if you lose speed suddenly.

- Everything’s ready to implement car graphics but I’m not sure if rotating surfaces work well in pygame. The tracks can have sprites too. (but someone has to draw them first, of course)

So here are some screens and a link to code if you want to try it. You’ll need numpy (scipy is not needed I guess) and pygame and a python interpreter of course.

Now that I used my extensive knowledge on high-school physics, basic calculus (taking derivative of polynomials really) and the numerical analysis course I took 2 years ago which I forgot everything except Lagrange polynomials, I can finally move onto real 2d stuff with linear algebra.

Of course I’ll fall asleep/faint on my bed first.

Oooh, magic mushroomies!

Link to the entry (downloads for Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X)

Another LD. It was fun, but maybe less (for me) than the previous times. Indeed, the conditions were not really good. I just moved back to school, so I spent quite a lot of time with my friends during the week end (saturday evening, and sunday afternoon). Plus, I’m crashing at a friend place so it’s not like I can throw pizza boxes around the room from my bed. And I didn’t have all my stuff, including a mouse for the laptop.

Despite all this, I managed to make a complete game, and I’m kinda happy about it.

What when wrong

• Strictly no idea for the theme. Plus the fact that I knew I couldn’t give my full attention to the compo. So after a (short) while, I decided to remake Boulder Dash, which I actually didn’t know (I had in mind a clone I used to play on my old Mac). Originality zero.
• Loss of motivation halfway through it. I actually spent quite a few hours on late saturday night toying with LuaGL and doing the examples of the Red Book, to distract me a little.
• Erm, graphics. I suck at them, and I didn’t have a mouse. So I re-drew stuff from the web, which I’ve been told is valid. Note however that the title and win screen use images I didn’t create, and therefore shouldn’t be taken in account when voting. All the rest is “hand drawn with a model”.

What went well

• As the game itself was fairly simple, and since I didn’t need to think of new  ideas, the coding was fast and headache free. Gamplay was complete in maybe 6 hours.
• With all the time I had left, I could take special care about the sound. SFXR gave me all the in game sounds, but I took a while to select them carefully. And I managed to write a 1:19 min music with Milkytracker, which I think is not too bad (could have been a lot better, of course).
• For once, I have a game with an end, and the difficulty progression is quite OK. I managed to play to the last level, so the game should be hard but beatable.
• Once again I praise Lua and LÖVE. They rock. Plus the multi-platform awesomeness.

I don’t know how to compare this entry with my previous ones. On the one hand, it’s not original, super simple and doesn’t look too good, but on the other hand, it’s finished, a bit polished, and the gameplay is supposed to be good (I didn’t invent it. I just hope I didn’t screw it in the implementation).

Now I don’t except high positions in the results, but I don’t consider it a “real” LD for me either. Next time I’ll be more ready and available.

Good voting, and congrats to all entrants!

LoneStranger's Caverns

I finally got my entry done.  It’s not nearly what I wanted it to be, but that’s ok.  It’s ok because it’s still a game.  Most of the time my entries end up being tech demos or proofs of some concept at the deadline.   This one is different though.  The engine itself is complete enough that you can create levels for it and actually play them.

If you’ve ever played the Kroz games, you’ll see the similarities.  I used it as massive inspiration.  I tend to forget about it when I think about my favorite games growing up, but there’s no denying that I spend hours upon hours playing it.

I can see myself working with this afterward, making the engine more robust and fixing some of the things that can be done in a more efficient manner.  There are plenty of new objects and mechanisms to create.  I only created a few of them.  I could create other monsters too.

Right now there is only one level, and it doesn’t have any kind of ‘campaign’ code to link more of them together, but that would certainly be in the cards.   A level editor would also be a must, as I did this first level using just a text editor and about twenty minutes.

For now though, I’m going to go spend time with my family who I have ignored this weekend.  And hey, maybe go to bed early.  There is work tomorrow.

Have fun with LoneStranger’s Caverns!

And that’s that. It ended up… not as polished as it could have been. As is always the way. I would have liked to have got a variety of weapons and some different aliens in there. As it is, I threw in the smaller enemies literally at the last minute so I don’t really know how difficult it is.

Play in browser here.

So I’m pretty happy to finally post my first ever completed entry for Ludum Dare. Check out Into the Pit: The Endless Caverns here!

It’s a game heavily-inspired/influenced/ripped off from level 2 of Battletoads for the NES (which was one of the more sane levels in that game). You basically go around avoiding spikes/traps and killing bats with a simple dash attack. Like Battletoads you can juggle the bats for extra points and to regain health. The game goes on forever until you die. Right now there’s plenty of chance of that due to the lack of end stage balancing since I ran out of time near the end and wanted to get things like menus done.

This time around my goal was over the first 24 hours to come up with a fully-playable prototype and to spend the last 24 hours adding graphics, audio, and polish. Surprisingly enough that actually held true for the most part. I managed to come up with the basic game late last night and I spend most of today on things like finer gameplay details and working on sprites and sounds. You may notice my explorer sprite is a little too close to comfort to a certain famous indie game character. Forgive me for that, I really suck at pixel art and being derivative was the best I could do.

One thing I’m actually really pleased with is how at the very end (literally the last 2 hours) a more ominous feel entered into the game. On a whim I added in some rumbling sounds that I looped continuously on the menu screen. Combined with screen shaking I really dug the “collapsing cavern” atmosphere that was being generated so I ran with that. If I had a little more time I would have liked to have added touches like falling debris and other signs of collapse.

Regardless I hope people enjoy it. Have fun and feel free to criticize and comment.

Note: It was made using Flixel which I understand is perfectly fine for this competition. And I can safely say that without Flixel there’s no chance in hell I would have had anything completed.

Finish the competition

Like a Boss

YEA~!!! watch that – feel good with ur self for the hard work and Good Night mates~!

“Like a boss~!” ^_^

I got it in about 10 minutes late due to some stupid MSVS bugs. For some reason, the player disappears when running in Release Mode instead of Debug Mode, what the heck?

I spent a bit of time near the beginning setting up an MVC in the code, but towards the end it kind of fell apart, which is what I was expecting.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with the game. I wish I had more time to work on sound and add some music. Of course, it would have been nicer to spend more time on expanding the levels and caves too. As you might be able to guess, I had originally planned being able to buy and aquire different items, including different pickaxes, etc.

In retrospect, the game turned out quite a bit like La-Mulana, which totally wasn’t my intention. Oops.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! It was certainly fun to make. I love Ludum Dare.

It was a long and tiring journey, but I made a game, you can watch me do it if you want:

anyhoo, I need sleep now, hopefully tommorow I’ll have time to play a large chunck of the entries

So, here it is, my entry for Caverns:

Refuge puts you in a turret defending one of the last cities of humanity from the alien invasion.

There is soo much more I wanted to do with this, and didn’t have time… but isn’t that always the story? It was a mad rush for the finish line, but I think I got it to a playable state.

Now I must go eat, because my stomach has begun consuming itself. Timelapse and postmortem to come later!

I didn’t get a chance to post about it before, because I was in a hurry to get it finished, sent off, and then take care of a few other things, but I did get it submitted in time! Behold, the Cave of Peril!

As you can see, the cave is very dark, so it’s very lucky that you have that handy dandy flashlight. You are being chased by evil invisible zombie gnomes, so it’s generally in your best interest to get away from them, all the while avoiding traps and goo and finding your way through the maze of death. Each level is procedurally generated, so you can keep playing for as long as you can survive. Have fun!

Talk about cutting it fine.

No, I didn’t quite finish my game, although it can now almost be described as a game, in that it has an ending and some sort of gameplay. It’s distinctly lacking in introduction, however, so I guess I’ll mention here how to play the damn thing:

Its a kind of text adventure, but you can walk about with the cursor keys and dig with the right control key. Type “help” for a summary of text commands. Your goal is to find the treasure.

I’m going to do a big ol’ post mortem for this one, so that’ll probably come tomorrow. But suffice it to say that I made some bad decisions that cost me a lot of time, and I vow to do better next time. I’ve also been taking time-lapse shots (because they’re awesome) so I’ll have to mash those together into some kind of video in the next few days.

So… yeah. There’s probably lots more I want to say but I’m mentally exhausted right now so I’m finding it difficult to… words….. Hopefully I haven’t missed out any crucial libraries from my executable. If the binary doesn’t work, you’ll need Python 2.6 and PyGame 1.8 – that’s all it should need as far as I can remember.

Once again I cannot wait to play the other entries tomorrow – they all look superb!

I can’t believe I actually got this in in time

I created “Ascent” in one day, after scrapping my project from saturday that wasn’t going anywhere. This one almost didn’t go anywhere either, but I changed direction in the last few hours and managed to produce something at least playable.

Play here!

I did it! I submitted my entry just in time for the end of the competition, too! And it is the first time since LD#11 that I’ve submitted a game with audio, no matter how jarring!

You can download the GNU/Linux version here: Mineral Miner for GNU/Linux: 1.2MB

I’ll try to have a Windows port up as soon as possible. Windows version: Mineral Miner for Windows” 2.1MB

Controls:
Use the arrow keys to move around.
Press the space bar to jump into and out of the front of your tank.

Collect all the minerals and return to the exit to finish the level.
You can only hold one set of minerals at a time. Return the minerals you collected to your tank to collect more.
Watch out for monsters! If you get too close to a monster lair, a monster will come out and attack you. You’ll have to find a way to stop them from coming out.

Congratulations to everyone who participated and finished a game in 48 hours!

Well, I managed to submit something that works and is playable! That’s kind of stupendous news to me. It’s not really all that hard (or long) but I am still interested in seeing what people think of it. I’m sure the submissiony system will go up soon and we can look at everything, but till then…

Sufi: http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~pmainwar/ld15.zip

Heyo, here tis:

http://www.originowl.com/Home/greencow-ld15

Finality.