My timelapse: (not sure how to embed it!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPk11bHJQG0

I finally finished up porting my entry for LD 15 to Mac OS X. It took a surprisingly long time (about 8 hours of work!) but amounted to virtually no change in the codebase. The code is available so hopefully someone else can save some time and avoid this nonsense.

• DevIL was removed and replaced with SDL_image.
• Sound and texture loading code was modified to work with OS X bundle path names.
• A 1 character bug causing poop to sometimes be emitted from the bats face instead of rear was fixed  (for real!)

I’ve updated the babe smashing hit game A CAVE FOR MY BIKINI BABES, making it now on v1.1.

PLAY IT HERE AND EARN HIGH SCORES!

Changelog:

• Added Mochi leaderboards!
• Slightly altered economy and item use counts!
• Fixed a bug that was preventing combo scores from counting (with the version I included in my LD submission, spikes were hands down the most efficient trap)!
• Capped the inventory for each trap at 20!
• Added a prep time of 15 seconds to the beginning of each level!
• Fixed a bug where you could get the player off the map!
• Altered enemy spawning and time limits slightly!
• Cop and babe walk speeds are now switched, to account for economy rebalancing!

So after a bit of a problem with Youtube and 700MB of wasted uploads, I finally got a working timelapse that can actually be seen from the Intertubes, wooh! Music added for dramatic and emotional effect.

Timelapse for \”The Narwhal Bacons At Midnight\”

If you haven’t played the game, you can do so here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=rate&uid=1097

Edit: How can I embed a Youtube video in WordPress?

I noticed a number of people were a little confused with how to play my entry Brinie, so I thought I would offer a quick guide to the game. It’s funny, I just assumed everyone would pick it up through playing it a little bit.

Ok, when the game starts, you should see Brinie, a net, and a bunch of things that look like fleas. These are the Grags. They live to eat, pretty much anything and everything. As Brinie is the only thing out there, you will see them start to chase her around. When they touch her, they begin feeding off of her. When they eat all they can, they will go off and cruise, but not before having a baby.  In this way, very quickly 10 Grags can become 100 Grags and 100 Grags can become 1000 Grags. If enough Grags get to Brinie, they will very quickly kill her off.

You have three options to try to save Brinie.

1) Drop a Gauloop somewhere on the playfield – it is a hive of small noisy creatures. These are like bait. They have a strong smell and may attract Grags away from Brinie. In the same way, Brinie doesn’t like the smell of the Gauloop so it may repel her a bit. You can use these to try to get her to go where you want, or if not that, at least keep her away from certain places. The problem with Gauloops is that Grags feed off them and will quickly devour them and cause the ranks of Grags to grow greatly.

2) Drop a Pauper somewhere on the playfield. A pauper is like a Gauloop, and it has a much stronger smell, but it doesn’t feed them nearly as well. What it does do is after a few seconds, it explodes, killing all Grags in the area. If positioned properly, this can be used to wipe out a huge population of Grags. The drawback is that Grags love to eat dead Grags, and a few living Grags will find the carnage a great feasting area and may quickly multiple their ranks back up.

3) Use your Net to capture Brinie. When Brinie is completely on the net, simply press the capture button and you win the game. The net also has the effect of killing any Grags on it at the time it is pressed. This fact can be used in combination with 1) and 2) to really wipe out the Grags. It is a great and difficult (and not necessary) accomplishment to completely wipe out the Grags, but it is possible and quite a fun challenge.

Now you are limited to 9 Gauloops, 6 Paupers and three Net captures, so use them wisely. Also, you can only have up to 3 gauloops and 1 pauper on the playfield at one time, so that is a consideration as well.

That’s about it. Hope that helps clarify some things. Here’s the game online in case you are interested in giving it a try now:

http://www.brinie.org

Yesterday I set up a survey to collect some demographic information, for our own curiosity. We’re currently sitting at 72 of 100 allowed polled people, so I’d like to reach 100 before posting the results. If you haven’t yet taken our survey, go here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=0XGGBruHxeEbdl24Y5zi0Q_3d_3d

It’s a simple one page, 3 questions multiple choice. Pick all that apply.

Thanks!

Cross-Compiling rocks! So here is the windows port.

I’m still to tired but tomorrow i’ll write a postmortem and hopefully give you the macosx port with the help of a good friend .

Just a quick note as I’ve had a few comments about this now:
As stated in my post mortem here I _severely_ buggered up the submission and included an old EXE in the upload, but the source to the correct version.
I did upload a fixed EXE compiled from the source in the package, however… but people may not have caught it.

The easiest way to check whether you have the correct version or not ( so I know if there really IS a speed issue or not ) is if you get sound. The old EXE has no sound, the correct one does. Those who have tested my game, could you double check that you’re using the correct EXE, please?

Again, if you want to make sure I’ve not just fixed something and tried to put that up, you can compile the source yourself, and can check the source for the framelock code in code/engine/CInterpret.cpp and the updateInterfaces function, which does a nasty hacky SDL-specific framelock to 60FPS.. I’m sure FRAPS or something will be able to detect the FPS of the game, and tell you whether it’s framelocked or not.

I do apologise for this and will make sure I properly test things in the next Ludum Dare!

First I would like to say thanks to all who commented on my game, I will make sure to consider your comments when making my next game. So I guess some things I should do for next time are:

• Bigger game window size, perhaps twice the size
• Make the game have more puzzles
• Stronger plot

Well I fixed some of the more glaring bugs in my game, so here’s the latest, post-competition version:

Dwarf Caverns 1.1

Stuff changed:

• Fixed enter key crashing game *eyeroll*
• Fixed bad map data causing crash in Linux
• Fixed “unknown door” problem
• Esc key now works on game over
• Added intro text
• Changed the way dirt is piled
• Now runs in fullscreen mode

Note: If compiling from source you need to copy “world.dat” and the “gfx” directory into “ld15caverns”. I only included them once so as not to bloat the download size any more than it already is

When I saw “Caverns” I quickly thought MinerVGA and decided to make a sidescrolling game about mining for gold and facing dangers like cave-ins and enemies. I decided that wasn’t going to work for some reason, and went to bed to come up with more ideas. (I always go to bed when I need ideas because late evening and early morning is when the mind is most creative.) The second concept was a sidescroller about shooting at cave formations like stalactites/stalagmites and suspended bridges to make them physics down onto enemies. After thinking about it for a while on Saturday morning, I started to hate that idea. It seemed gimmicky and hard to pull off well.

Several random walks. The final level generation algorithm isn’t much different. (more…)

I wrote about Rock Warrior to my blog and added a separate page which also has a sort of mini-mini-post mortem – including a YouTube video of the game.

I’ve just uploaded an OSX version, and have added the following updates on top of the previous version’s fix of the jumping bug:

• Fixed the performance on 16bit displays.  Thanks to Endurion for pointing this out.
• Reflectors can no longer be placed on top of each other.  Should make the game slightly easier.
• The game was accidentally set to default to antialiasing being on.  This seemed to cause slowdowns on the linux version, and may cause other issues for folk on other OSes.  It’s completely unnecessary anyway, since the graphics are entirely made up of (pre-antialiased) bitmaps.  If you’ve already run an older version though, you’ll have to either delete the CavernsOfLight.conf file (see the readme for the location – it’s different for each OS), or change the ‘a 6′ line to ‘a 0′.

Quite a few of the comments I’ve had have complained about the game’s difficulty.  My only defense here is that I’ve been playing a lot of Spelunky, Mighty Jill Off, and When Pigs Fly lately, all of which rely on pretty accurate jumping skills.  I think when I have a bit more time I’ll probably do an updated version with 3 different levels: easy; normal (the level currently included with the game), and sadistic, which will be massive and absolutely punishing .

Incidentally, if anyone likes the game enough to make their own level for it, I’d love to hear from you!

My original concept for this game was to make a metroidvania type game with at least one normal enemy(a bat; every cavern game needs a bat) and one boss. The end result was much different than the original concept but things seemed to work out in the end even after dropping a few elements.

The game

What went right

• The language chosen(haXe)
  Learning to use haXe and using haXe for the game worked well. The language is very similar to actionscript 3 so there weren’t many times where I had to search for documentation while programming the game. This made porting my as3 framework much easier.
• Dealing with game assets
  I had an asset loader written in perl so that would run before the game built. Any asset that I wanted to add could just be placed in an image and sound folder and used in haXe with all the needed classes set up. This saved a lot of time and let me see how things looked in game instantly without having to change any code or playing around in FlashDevelop.
• The removal of original game concepts
  At roughly six hours before the end of the compo, I only had the player art and code done. If I tried to add an enemy and a boss, I would probably have gotten stuck on the art portion and would have had a game with just a player walking around. Adding the relics made the game a little less empty with some sort of objective to reach while keeping the implementation time low.

What went wrong

• Collision detection
  Implementing collision detection took almost a day to get somewhat right. Additionally, I never added the collision for ramps so walking on those tiles may have seemed a little odd. Jumping into a tile from the bottom sometimes warped the player to the left or right edges of a tile.
• Music
  There was actually music in the game. If you turn your volume up enough you might just be able to hear it. The music was originally much louder than it was now but it was repetitive so I turned it down so that no one would notice it.
• Art
  I only had one set of tiles done and no background tiles in the game. If you look closely at the player, he never alternates the foot that steps forward when walking.

• Game length
  The game was very short. Originally, it was only about collecting three relics and the player would win. Even after adding in the secret path, the game still felt like it should have had some more things in it.

How the relics came to be

• The double jump relic was planned for in the original metroidvania concept.
• The ability to look backwards was made due to not having backwards implementation done yet. I originally decided to just have the player moonwalk backwards due to time constraints before I changed my concept.
• The sight beyond sight relic was really just enabling the user to see the debugging hitboxes on the player. The white rectangle represents the player hitbox, the yellow boxes represents the tiles checked and their hitboxes, and the red represents colliding tiles.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how the game turned out. I was planning on moving from as3 to haXe on newer projects and this compo gave me a crash course on it.

Ok, so we’ve all just had a load of fun with LD15, but it would be a shame if by decembers LD you totally sucked at 48 hour development, so I think its a good idea to get some practice in between now and then, to make sure you are in tip-top shape

So I’ll be hosting septembers Mini LudumDare, which will start  Saturday 12th at 00:00 UTC and end 48 hours later.

the theme will be announced at the start, but if you want to be *extra* prepared, it might be an idea to make sure you can access data on the web using whatever you make your games with… if you want

- GirlFlash

I fear that most of you wont enjoy the game enough to actually play it through, but I must say that I enjoyed the game by myself a lot, so I decided to record a video ‘walkthrough’ (of course this can’t be used as more but guideline, since the cave is procedural). Once again, I had really great fun with the compo, and for the first time ever I’m going to explore the game idea deeper (maybe I’ll even manage to make it more deriving from Spelunky)!

Watch the video here on vimeo!
Somehow the embeddation didn’t work…

I saw someone having trouble getting the GNU/Linux version to compile. Is anyone else having this issue? Please post any error messages here.

If you have GNU/Linux, could you try it out and see if you have trouble with it? Mineral Miner for GNU/Linux: 1.2MB

Thanks for your help!

I didn’t intend to take part in this Ludum Dare.  A friend told me about LD a while ago, so I had looked in a little after previous competitions and liked the idea, but I didn’t intend to take part .  The same friend told be he was going to take part in this LD which I thought was neat, but I still didn’t intend to take part myself.  In browsing through the comments on the “Welcome to Ludum Dare 15!” post a few hours before the competition started,  I got to reading about what people said they were going to be using to make their entries and thought I’d check out LOVE for a bit of fun, not at all intending to make something for LD.

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Hint: I composed all the music on a gameboy.