Hello everybody! Yet i have a first game screen. My game is a remake of an old russian game about a frog jumping on nenuphars

(guess what it is!), i’ve called it “funnyfrog”. It is written is java using the lwjgl library. graphics are made with inkscape and gimp.

funnyfrog

Super Game Boy changed my life.

Progress:  Spent WAY too effing long in Photoshop.  It’s way too easy for me to get distracted tweaking pixels.  I have an intro that I’m really happy with, but no gameplay at all yet!  Time to focus on that now.  Definitely NOT time to play my copy of Umihara Kawase DS that arrived yesterday.  Focus, Mike.

I got a late start today, so not much got done.

I wrote the design document (Which I posted earlier), first of all.

I also wrote a base class for game entities, and got most of a game agent class done. I’ve laid out a bit of other code, as well.

All in all, a slow day. But there’s still tomorrow.

For tomorrow, I plan to get the game agents and weapons working at the very least, and possibly get a basic level in place. This will involve making some artwork, which I look forward to doing. It will also involve some sounds, which will also be fun.

I’m happy to finally have something compelling to work on. It’s a nice change.

—Mr.Dude

Ok…finally I will call my game “Plague”. So far I have my character in game, moveable with keyboard-controlls. Still lots to do but I’m on the way.

Btw: For those people how don’t know about the game I want to remake (and I think this might be 100%!?) here a screenshot from original:

Hey, this actually is kinda like a game now. I can move around with the red worm and dig holes. Well, I guess I’ve got the destructible terrain covered already, even though I thought that would be a really difficult thing to nail. Frankly, I expected the simple approach of modifying the image on the fly not to work fast enough, especially because Löve is using OpenGL behind the scenes, so I basically need to upload the fullscreen texture to the GPU every time I modify the terrain. I guess the real hard part will be making the different weapons.

I’ve written up a design docs for my game.

I’ve posted it in its entirety after the break.

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I’ve flip-flopped, and chosen a new idea.

The title of the game is Ladybird, and it is a Megaman clone.

My next post will have details.

—Mr.Dude

It didn’t take me very long to come up with a game I wanted to clone, because I had thought about it before. I might skip destructible terrain, and the weapon selection will likely be very limited. I’ll also be trying out a gamepad control scheme instead of the classic keyboard controls. I’m calling it “Mato” for now. The screenshot should be pretty recognisable for anyone who’s played the original.

I’m starting out with the Löve game engine, but I haven’t actually used it before so I might scrap it if I feel hindered by it. I kinda do want to use scripts for defining the various weapons and stuff though, so Lua will most likely be a part of the project.

I don’t know how much I will be able to accomplish over this weekend, but I made a mess of graphics for “More Exciting Bike.”  It’s like Excite Bike with explosions!

I have no clue what game I’ll be cloning. Maybe a game about cloning or some such silliness. But I am going to clone/port/provide bindings of Allegro for the Tcl scripting language. A little mini-project.

I’ve decided to clone Lost Vikings. The title of my game is Beasties.

The three protagonists are:

Krull – An Orc who has a shield and a claymore

Penelope – A Centauress who can run fast and jump and has a crossbow and dagger

Eric – A Dwarf who can move heavy things and has an axe

A few notes:

Krull’s shield protects from everything that hits it. It is made of “Orcish steel” that can deflect anything. Simple at that. And his sword has about 1.5x the reach of Eric’s axe.

Penelope has unlimited bolts for her crossbow, since ammo management isn’t part of the game. It takes about as long to fire as it takes one of the boys to swing their respectice weapons. Her dagger has about half the reach of Eric’s axe. When not running, she moves about 1.5x as fast as Krull, but when running, she moves three times his speed. She can jump about half the screen high and a full screen long.

Eric can lift heavy objects, break fragile terrain, and force heavy mechanisms. He moves at about 75% of the speed that Krull moves at.

I have yet to decide on a story for this thing, though, so stay tuned!

Actually I just wanted to go to bed and checked a last time for news about MiniLD….

Argh…the theme was there ==> no sleep! Clone,…yeah! Always had in mind to clone once one of my favorite games of my childhood. So I started immediately. And of course as always starting with the content, hehe. May I present: the three protagonists.

Does anyone recognize the game?

Well,…my history in finishing games is not the best. Nevertheless I’m optimistic as ever to finish this time 

Stay tuned and good night

It’s a time honored tradition of the gaming industry.

Take a look at these screenshots and see if you can tell what all of these games have in common.

Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is after the cut.

EDIT: SUBMIT HERE

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I get these in the mail every so often. Seeing how this one relates to the community, I thought I’d share. My apologies, it seems my scanner is dead, so I had to photograph instead.

A suspicious letter showed up in the mail today.

Wow, "THE" Domain registry of Canada... I didn't realize we had a domain registry

It seems very professional.

How considerate! A return envelope!

I guess it’s time to renew our website…

Wow! We can save $40 by renewing for 5 years!

In case you didn’t know, we also own ludumdare.org as a backup site, in case something crazy happens and we lose the dot com to domain thieves.

If lawsuits are threatened...

Alternatively, you could use a registrar like Godaddy, then google for coupons. I usually spend less than $10 a year myself. Get hosting elsewhere though.

Have a nice day.

My game this time around will be a fighting game.

It will be written in Lua, using an SDL wrapper linked with Alien. (Alien is a Foreign Function Interface binding written for Lua. It’s cross-platform, too!)

Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll be writing out the plans and getting some plans ready.

Excelsior!

—Mr. Dude

Hi everybody,

I’d like a quick show of hands who will be at the Game Developers Conference in March. I realize the IGF Mobile, IGF Student, and Gamma results aren’t available yet, but we’d just like to get a rough idea how many Ludum Dare folk will be attending (or *might be* attending). Post a comment.

Also, let us know if you’re a San Fransisco resident (or familiar with the city). We could use some expertise, as Phil and I are just tourists. We’d like to arrange some sort of Ludum Dare meetup one of the evenings, and could use some help picking an establishment.

Thanks!

The 2nd Global Game Jam happens at the end of January, one week after the upcoming MiniLD. I’m curious as to how many LDers will be participating, and where — I’ll be at the Scottish Game Jam in Glasgow. Anybody else feeling up for some slightly more social game dev?

My entry Asploreheim has been retired – I deleted the database tables and set it to give an error message on login. I have, however, preserved the scores at the scores page.

Blackduck says …
Fun game, kind of laggy because of all the flags at the start. Gets quite repetitive eventually.

I’m glad you thought it was fun at first (and that I fixed the superlag bug). It does get repetitive, I admit, but you’ve gotta keep Exploring!

AtkinsSJ says …
It seems like a good start, but never really feels ‘gamey’, unless I’ve missed something. And yeah, the paths around the middle make it really laggy – perhaps it would work better if hills only drew paths to nearby hills.

Yeah, it’s more of a tech demo than a true game. And I fixed the bug, thankfully.

C418 says …
The game is now pretty much completely… uh… flagged up.
At first I thought the brown stuff was a weird kind of background, but after seeing this screenshots, I realized that it’s actually paths. As there are lot of flags now, I presume the game is a bit popular?

Heh… “completely” was a side effect of the terrible lag thing and the center bias. If you managed to move out, it was pure empty. The idea is you have to just keep going. And it was popular at first, hence the “oh crud I released my game an hour ago and it’s already asploded”

TenjouUtena says …
Every time someone needs to try a MMO, right? Obviously ambitious, but relatively unfinished. You need some sort of scrolling background to indicate that you should walk outside of the paths.

Ambitious and unfinished – that about sums it up. I’ll remember some better UI and polish if I ever revive Asploreheim.

philomory says …
This is such an awesome idea, I wished it had actually worked for me.

The registration and login went ok, and I loaded the game world and heard the music and could walk around, but as soon as I walked onto an unclaimed hill, asploreheim.exe spiked my CPU and never went down. I had to force quit. When I tried to log in again afterwards, the game immediately crashed on login. Alas.

After some testing, the infinite loop on hill get seemed to be a side effect of the client not being able to handle all the server’s data. Oh well

SonnyBone says …
This thing killed my internet connection, I think. I logged in and then 3 minutes later my router went down. lol

All joking aside… this is a neat idea, it just doesn’t work as well as you’d like.

Routers are silly that way :p
And that seems to be the overall consensus… cool but broken.

Covenant says …
It crashes everytime I move the cursor on top of the button to register and/or login…

Clicking if the “too much data” thing occurs, but just moving the cursor over it? I haven’t a clue why that happens.

NiallM says …
I found it very buggy. Most times it would crash as soon as I hit the login button. As others have said, it could use some kind of background to indicate that you’re moving, and it really needs some kind of goal beyond the basic ‘flag as many hills as you can’ goal. Maybe the ability to build your own castle once you’ve flagged enough hills?

Very buggy indeed. Castles are something to remember should I revive the project.

Wiering says …
If I try to register, it says Server not found.

That… is a problem? Did you register from in-game or out? I know I completely forgot to implement the in-game button.

pythong says …
nice idea with the multiplayer

Thanks.

Hempuli says …
Interesting, though shortlived.

True, true indeed.

ippa says …
I want to play without registering, create a test / test account! Or make use of facebook connect ..ppl hate another reg

I don’t have Facebook myself, but a test account would have been a good idea…

hazman says …
Awesome idea.

Really buggy.

That’s it, essentially – clever but nowhere near complete.

sirGustav says …
unable to register and cursor blinked too fast

Unable to register in-game I bet… button did nothing. Cursor blinking fast? I don’t know of “too fast” but I didn’t framerate-inhibit on the main screen.

In conclusion, Asploreheim was a great idea, but I did a horrible job at it. I forgot to implement in-game register, allowed the data to grow to unhandleable sizes, and generally it was hard to play. Mega-congrats to Moltanem however who got 81 hills!

This has come up in the ‘Should Game Maker (etc. al.) count’ thread, but I thought I would split it off here, so that we can keep the conversations topical, and because I’m interested in what other people think.  Also, I do agree with a few other people in that thread, that coming to an agreement about what LD is about will assist any rules or voting changes that may or may not take place.

What I’m going to write here is a lot my opinion, but is also collected and paraphrased from what I have heard other people said.

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