After having spent most of the development time on my game, I realized that I’d been making the same game over and over again, and got very tired of it. My game was yet another crappy sidescrolling platformer, and I got very tired of it.

So… I threw in the towel, but didn’t tell anyone ’till now because I needed the time to relax. It hurt giving up yet again, but I just couldn’t stand to work on my idea anymore.

See ya next month for the Mini-LD, though. I’ll try to do something new and weird, because I can’t stand the idea of doing another platformer.

Here’s hoping…

–Mr.Dude

It seems some people are having bother running this on XP – I built it on Windows 7 and it seems the error comes from a handler that is in msvcrt.dll on vista/7 but not on XP.

I will try to get an XP build done as soon as I get home from work today. Anyone who is rating my game and can’t get it to run, I beg you to bare with me today and I’ll sort it out.

Thanks,

Grieve

Diet Chugg says …
I found this game to be fun. Having the informational box is really nice to have too. Sometimes I wanted to do things faster and the game would not keep up with my clicking speed though. However it was a very good game, well balanced, liked being able to upgrade, however I’m still not sure exactly what gave you the upgrades. (I would like to know and since I would I think other players would too.)

Ai was a little weak. I would like to see different difficulties added in the future.

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You can click the help button then hover it over the locked items to see how to unlock them.

As for game speed, I suppose it could’ve been faster. Come to think of it, I really should have put something along the lines of a 2x speed option, since the rate of how often everything is updated is controlled by a single variable..

There are three difficulty levels. I said something about it on the entry page, but it’s hidden in-game if your mouse isn’t near it because it tends to take your eye sometimes. Move the mouse to the lower-left and click the face to change the difficulty.

ickylevel says …
I can’t play it because my screen is a bit too small (can’t see the menu) ! Sounds like galcon but with “upgrades”.

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The resolution is only 800×600. Most modern computers do not screen support resolutions lower than this. Perhaps try it on another machine?

More details on my entry here.

Game Link – Timelapse Link

Lucky I decided to submit the game when I did, I fell asleep almost right away after and didnt wake up till a few hours after the deadline had passed

Here‘s the timelapse video of me making Jump Pirate. I think there’s a frame (at about 1:37) of the final screen with “0 deaths” written on it, but that was a (subsequently fixed) bug, unfortunately.

I mentioned in my final I’m-Just-Gonna-Write-This-Then-Go-Pass-Out post that there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to write up but was too tired to at the moment. So:

Yesterday afternoon/evening was a real struggle. I’d done most of of the level design by then (a pretty herculean task in it’s own right), and early afternoon wrote two lists of the things I needed to do to make it a game, and the things I wanted to do to be happy with the result.

The first list read:

• Finish level design.
• Put in overarching game logic.
• Add intro and ‘outro’.
• Test that all orbs are reachable.

The second read:

• Add sound.
• Add music.
• Add ‘epilogue’ levels
• Add map
• Add sound + music toggle buttons.
• Add reset button
• Save game progress to cookies
• Test Test Test.

.. and I only had about 12 usable hours left. Obviously my work was cut out for me. So I put some music on, stopped blogging, stopped eating (not wise, I just forgot I needed food) and got my head down.

Somehow I managed to get everything on those lists done aside from progress saving (oh and possible one or two of the three ‘Test’s). Hard, but, I think/hope it was worth it.

Isles of Color

Just worked out that I spent approx 18 hours each day actually working, so, 36 total, ouch! Had a really brilliant time though, cheers everyone for making it the event that it is, particularly everyone on irc. Being able to chat to people going through the same stuff really buoyed me up when I needed it most.

There’s a timelapse video coming (it should be moderately entertaining as I spent so much time on level design), and I’m sure I’ll write up a proper postmortem at some point once my thoughts have settled a bit. Will have to get voting too, over 200 entries!? jeez!

I fixed three critical bugs:

The new version has already been uploaded. Get it here.
As for the Mac and Linux ports, I’m having a bit of a problem with the Mac port, so it might take a bit longer than expected. But you can always try to compile the source for yourself.

I have uploaded the timelapse on Youtube: Watch it here.
Gameplay and walktrough video will follow as soon as I have the Mac port ready.

I’m still a little bit sleepy, but I wanted to fix those bugs as soon as possible. And because I hacked the game together in such short time I didn’t care about memory resources and stuff you need a relatively fast computer to run (works fine on my Macbook Pro in a virtual machine, but sometimes lags on my Single-core Atom 1.6 GHz Nettop).

Read on for the post-mortem.
(more…)

Haven’t played too many of the games yet, partly because of being stuck playing Hempuli’s Paradise Fort and having too much fun.

Anyway, the tower:

Note the damaged sections where it was HIT BY METEORS!!!

(more…)

Oh well my weekend plans were devastated by personal issues but in the last 6 hours I was able to put together a game, a little bit different from my original idea, that really sucks.

have fun shooting some monsters and defending the island !

My entry is up!

Play Pee Wee Pirates

Between this and Game-in-a-Day, I’ve done this kind of weekend “game jam” thing probably 10 times now (yikes). But this is the first time in a couple of years, so I was a bit rusty going in. I also decided at the last minute to go with an alpha-quality development framework that had some serious limitations.

Despite all that, though, it was fun to work on, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. Now I’m just looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with. =)

Thanks to everyone who organized the event!

Well, for only having been able to work on this for 12 hours, I think I did a pretty darn good job. I used JPixel again (as I mentioned before), which basically has support for OpenGL, pixely particle effects, and a lot of other junk.

Okay, I admit it, I was banking on “Escape” when I came up with my game idea. Therefore I will admit that the only thing that this game really has to do with islands is that it randomly takes place on one. I really would have loved to be more original here and go with the actual theme, but I was very short on time (12 hours was even far more than I suspected) and having spent 3 of that drawing the characters I had to go with I had planned. I already had design docs written up and all that beforehand and this sort of game really uses JPixel well, so that’s that.

Anyway. In Zombie Grinder you are running from a horde of zombies! I thought it would be fun to do an escape-type fighting game where you’re not limited by hit points. So, in this you can’t die unless you touch the horde on the left side of the screen. As such, even though you can be attacked by up to 50 enemies at once (I limited it because any more might slow down older systems), as long as you can stay on the right side of the screen you’re pretty safe. Turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.

I coded all the characters using the same base class, and gave the AI the ability to compare “factions” for who they wanted to attack. This ended up giving the awesome side effect of being able to drop in allies (same faction as the player) with very little fuss. All I had to do was draw a new character (or just tint the player’s guy, of course). This adds a very cool element where you’re running madly from these zombies and you can have some dumb friends drop in and distract some of the zombies. I really would have loved to play on this mechanic more but obviously didn’t have the time.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. It’s a simple little time waster that does, more or less, what I went for. And the number of moves you can do, along with the complexity of the combat system, is pretty awesome. My big disappointment is that I didn’t finish doing weapons in time – trust me, they would have been awesome.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think.  This could use a lot more work and quite a bit more polish (worst backgrounds ever!), but hey we can’t have everything. And don’t worry about losing – you can’t!

PS – Yes indeedy the gameplay and characters are inspired by River City Ransom.

My favorite screenshot

Lots of zombies and a few allies

I mad a timlaps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r-Ha9IFKHU

I edited out a couple hours (frames) of sleeping and eating.  It’s kind of fast and strobey.

Look at that, it has a name now.

Ok, so since I last made a post a lot has changed. The AI now makes ships and does stuff. the units and cities now look like units and cities. there is a bit of a user interface for current gold and unit creation. Paths are simplified to diagonals after they have been determined. Also, some minor tweaks all over.

Grab it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1168

Done! My first 3D game ever. I’m tired but happy about it.

Entry is here, for GNU/Linux and Windows.

Arks of Mercy

Be the savior of an endangered nation, as the level of the waters rise ineluctably. Guide your people to the safest mountains, build boats, teleportation towers and mighty shelters before it is too late!

Be sure to read the readme. It might not be very complex, but there are no instructions ingame at all.

EDIT: the readme might not be totally clear, but you can change the whole keymapping (not only for the gamepad) in keymap.lua

Be sure to check the Gameplay video!

Also, no Windows binaries yet, sorry. Will work on it, but I don’t have a Windows computer right here.

EDIT: ported!

Since this is clearly going to be an all nighter, I might as well do the traditional postmortem right away.

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OK, I’ve finished uploading all the platform builds and the source, fixed a critical bug and now I’m all done!

So I’ve managed to finish a playable entry. I’m surprised! I wasted so many hours on Saturday because I had no idea. Finally I started making art assets without having a clear idea of what I was going to make. By Sunday I had not written a single line of code. Sunday afternoon was spent tinkering with Unity and trying some physics based controls that didn’t work. So 7 hours before the deadline I still had no gameplay and wasn’t sure what it would be.

In the end the gameplay is very minimalistic, just some platformer controls and that’s it. I hope it can still be enjoyable for a few minutes. I was even able to add sound effects (thanks to sfxr) and also made a kind of “music” (I hope it’s not too annoying).

That’s it for now. I have recorded a timelapse but I’ll take care of that later.

Alright, so this was my first experiment with timelapsing (I used chronolapse). I used 120 seconds per picture, so it’s sorta choppy, and I missed a couple hours when I forgot to turn chrono back on, but it’s definitely a cool way of seeing how you work.

LD17 Timelapse \”Island Hopping\”

Also, you should really check out my entry page: here [/shameless plug]

Can we get a sound off on how everyone enjoyed their LDs? Personally, I had a blast and learned more about programming in the past 48 then the past 2 weeks. If you learned something, or something held you back, state it here!

ok so in Ludum dare 16 I threw out the idea of trying to beat all the games entered by the end of the 2 week rating period and I’m having the contest again.

Rules:

1.  Beat the game and collect all the secrets  (if it is possible to)

2. rate and comment on the game (this is always possible to do)

There will be no prize for this contest. If you don’t know which game to beat first you could always start with mine. It’s easy because I failed to make enough levels. (only 2 levels total.) Good Luck.

(Also…) I forgot to include my source code when I submitted. How do I go about adding it?

Entry Here, Game Here (source currently available by viewing source and grabbing the js and css files.)

This time I tried to write a very simple game after failing with multi-bodied collision response and pixel-perfect collision detection in LD15.

Evil Lair Command is a variation on Missile Command where you defend your volcanic island lair from the likes of 007. Ripe for lots of humor that never made it in (see below).

I decided I really wanted to try HTML5′s Canvas despite having never worked in it before and not touching  javascript since 2007. I prepped myself for this challenge by blitting an image to a Canvas on Thursday.  The biggest hurdle (for me) was the fact that an image doesn’t load immediately upon setting its source. I was rewriting the image handling code up to about 15 minutes before the deadline because the old code was crashing when I added boat spawning. There’s still a lot of bad code leftover from the old image handling methods, like the initGameState which is now a NOP (thankfully it doesn’t crash anything and just silently moves on to the next state).

I also lost a lot of time yesterday when I got sick. I ended up sleeping several hours in the afternoon and when I was working I wasn’t concentrating that well.

Stuff that was planned but didn’t make it in:

• Water texture that I spent more than 3 minutes creating.
• Laser graphics.
• Explosions.
• Minions (lives). Each time a boat hits the island a named minion would be lost protecting the island from a named government agent.
• Increasing difficulty as time progresses instead of just throwing a mass of boats at you in the beginning and spawning a new boat at a more-or-less constant rate (it’s a constant rate that’s perturbed by a random variation).
• Sound effects (including Evil cackles).
• Game restart that’s not triggered by clicking. Because it’s annoying to be trying to click on a boat just before it “reaches” the island, only to find you’ve started a new game.

Oh well, I have all the time in the world to add those features now. =p If I do, I’ll probably post a link to it from the Game Site, leaving the LD17 entry where it’s at for judging.

- Micah