Well, the past few hours haven’t been that productive. I think my main blocker has been the simpleness of this game. I’m putting off “level design” because I want to get more of the code done, but the truth is that the coding is actually finished. Events, game logic, etc are all done.

So, I’m happy to announce that Level one is complete.

I’m going to draw out the other levels (4 or 5), make sure they’re challenging enough and that the story makes sense, and that’s the goal for today.

I’m Nate Wiesel, and this is my second attempt at a Ludum Dare game. During Ludum Dare 16 however, I couldn’t finish soon enough due to lack of programming knowledge at the time. However this time, I have a bundle of fresh new ideas! (Freshness of ideas may vary.)

With the theme as ‘Islands’, I wasn’t quite sure what to do at first, but eventually after a lot of experimentation, I came up with making a platformer. My game, now called ‘Island Escape’, has 5 hand-drawn levels (and a final “boss” level) about a nameless guy who washes up ashore on a deserted island, and wants to build a boat to escape. It’s not the most original idea ever but I’m trying to pull some unique concepts out of it and make it at least somewhat enjoyable. I’m usually used to taking my time with projects so it’s a bit tough to do this kind of thing under time constraints, but hopefully I’ll pull through.

Here’s a little bit of what I’m working on:

Gameplay Footage 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOG-HH_Et9A

Original Character Sprite http://i.imgur.com/kZKZs.png
Animating Character Sprite http://yfrog.com/9e3hpp
Level Concept http://yfrog.com/1n33vp
Map Screen http://yfrog.com/0kzfup
Bouncy Good Fun!!1 http://yfrog.com/0p257fp
It’s Just You And Me, Palm Tree http://yfrog.com/5jfklp

I hope you all like it when it is done!

Ok so as usual i spent way too much time tweaking how this draws and not actually making characters. My player is still an axis, and he can walk on water. Blah.

Ironically, I spent a while getting the “pixelated” edges to blend smoothly but not blur out to mush. And to top it all off, this is still tmp art. Why did I draw a tmp plant?? why?? I’d really like to get depth map shadows in here, but I don’t think there’s time for that, at least if I want to have any gameplay.

But I’m pretty happy with the drawing, it’s using 4x FSAA and 4x oversampled textures to get crisp yet blocky 16×16 tiles, epic overkill of graphic hardware.

I hereby have officially named my game “Floatation”. Do not steal my name!!

Okay, so I didn’t update you yet, but I have been taking pictures along the way.  This game is going to be done completely with photos, instead of the usual.  It’s pretty fun doing this so far.  ^ Here you can see how dirty our bath tub is…  This is with a single controllable sprite.

^ Here’s when I got some AI for the computer player and too many cannon balls.

^ Here’s the foreground effect in place (and some ugly water – which might just stay…).

Now, the game?  Plod around and shoot stuff with your cannon, so far.  I have a few directions I can take it, but I haven’t settled yet.  Treasure collection?  Cleaning toys?  Environment puzzles?  Save the captured toys?  One of those, surely.

I’ve tweaked the graphics, made the game a bit harder, and added more detail to the backgrounds.

Now not looking quite as bad...

Unfortunately I’m going to be busy tomorrow, so I’ll have to try and roll out the finished version soon. Oh, and HERE’S A NEW, UPDATED, SOMEWHAT AMAZING DEMO.

Well, i’ve got a good little HUD working now, which makes thing that much easier. Almost ready to make an engine release!

Hmm... few to many l'il dudes there....

And the ball is rolling! The sprites are drawn (some anyway), and I’m now finishing off OBJ support in the PPU emulator class. Here is the sprite sheet I’ve just drawn up, see if you can guess where I’m going:

BRRRAINNNSS

For some reason, I just wasn’t able to get a good start yesterday. Starting to catch up now I think.

Click here for my in-progress builds (Requires Flash Player)

Sticking the rest of this behind a read-more tag, since there’s a bunch of images.
(more…)

Hi all,
I only just found out this morning (a couple of hours ago) what the theme was because of internet problems, and I am quite busy today (is morning here and we are having guests come over this afternoon), but I will see what I can do with the Islands theme

I haven’t gone in a Ludum dare before, but I If I get something working in time for the competition, great!

I might try some sort of island shaped 2d maze like game with a robot in it or something LOL
Good luck to all!!

cheers,
Paul

check it out so far! this is for ludumdare 17!

Go here 2 play!:

http://www.probegames.webs.com/

I finally got the watery effect I was looking for, and learned a thing or two about LOVE’s SpriteBatches. (I ended up dumping Java+Slick for what I know and LOVE.)

Menu screenshot for Ahoy!

A brief aside, if you will.  In the game “Oregon Trail”, you can manage your wagon-ride every which way, but in the end, everyone I know fondly remembers hunting as “the fun part”.  There was all this incidental stuff about fording rivers and getting typhoid fever and that was nice but everyone just wanted to hunt.

I had brainstormed out this big resource-trading mogul game, and thought that every once in a while there would be ship-to-ship combat.  Then I realized- combat is probably going to be Ahoy!’s “fun part”.  If you have trouble getting into the trading-resources-to-grow-an-empire sort of game, you should at least be able to immediately dip into some action.  Which is why there’s a “Combat Minigame” option right under “Main Game” on the menu.

This will also serve as a fallback in case I can’t finish the Main Game (and it’s complex enough that I might not)- I’ll still have an entry, because I’ll be finishing the combat part first.

I added that floating island enemy from my last post into the game. It drops mines that blow up people on islands (onos) and the boat. You lose all the people you’re carrying and lose 50 points when you get hit. Three hits, and you’re dead.

Uploaded a video to them tubes, to show off actual gameplay and stuff. And for testing. Click the image below to watch it and stuff:

Also, after taking the videos, I finally added CLOUDS!!!

Now you can play “AlienIslands”!

Click Here to play!

yeah i made some more updates and he looks really freaky now.

Come and play!

http://www.probegames.webs.com/

Here is what i have so far after 6 hours of work.

Now just to do AI, island control, upgrades, music, and sounds.

wow thats a lot…

More progress.

I also have written two songs for it! But I can’t upload mp3s… You’ll just hafta play it when it’s done, hmn?

My game is starting to take shape… I have a player that I can move, even though he’s only drawn as an axis right now.

these are just temp art (i hope), my plan is to get the engine going tonight and then leave tommorow for content.

One nice thing is that I’m using the OGMO level editor, and it was very easy to make a layer for elevation and another layer for tiles.. so even though it wasn’t build with this kind of game in mind, it’s flexible enough to support it.

Still not 100% sure what the setting/theme will be… but the general idea is that gameplay will be some sort of narrative roguelike.

Well Ive been working pretty much solid since the theme was announced, and am finally at the stage where I have an emergancy build that I can submit if everything else goes horribly wrong:

Angry Stan And The Island Of Doom

introducing “Angry Stan And The Island Of Doom”,

The basic Goal of “ASATIOD” is to collect all of the gold coins from the island before the tide gradually comes in and drowns you, if you dont get to the coins before the tide washes them away, you have had it.

It still needs a lot of tweaking and tidying up, also the collision responce is acting really weird and making it look like Stan has Parkinsons (mabee thats why he’s angry?) anyway Im going to take it off my bug list and add it to my feature list because I think its kind of cool.

Hoping to either use allegro’s font handling to create some better text, or use sprites.

Also still need to add a menu and congradulation screen.

Now there are enemies, food, and a progress bar for your size.

I think the next step will be to add the villagers that go on your back. And maybe have the enemies move around.