Now that was Ludum Dare 17! Everybody exhausted? There’s no time to be exhausted! It’s voting time!

As usual voting will last for 2 weeks. And with more than 200 entries, we can’t expect everyone to play everything. Still, everyone has been randomly assigned 20 games, so we ask that you at least play those. More would definitely be appreciated, and the the more games you rate, the higher your score in the “Coolness” category. For an example of final ratings, take a look at Ludum Dare 16′s results.

From the Wiki, the categories you’ll be rating games based on, and what they mean:

1. Innovation – The unexpected. Things in a unique combination, or something so different it’s notable.
2. Fun – How much you enjoyed playing a game. Did you look up at the clock, and found it was 5 hours later?
3. Theme – How well an entry suits the theme. Do they perhaps do something creative or unexpected with the theme?
4. Graphics – How good the game looks. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc.
5. Audio – How good the game sounds. A catchy soundtrack, suitable sound effects, voice overs, etc.
6. Humor – How amusing a game is. Humorous dialog, funny sounds, or is it so bad it’s good?
7. Overall – Your overall opinion of the game, in every aspect important to you.
8. Community – Journals, photos, timelapse video. Everything you do above and beyond just making the game.
9. Coolness – How many games you rated? Score a Bronze, Silver, and Gold by rating LOTS of games.

That’s all for now. Go vote!

Interesting Links: [ Torrent containing most of the entries ]
[ LD17 Keynote | Theme Voting Results | Leave us Feedback or Suggestions ]

This was a really strange LD for me. I had no Internet all weekend – it was like the eighties, except with Flixel. Without IRC and blogs, making a game by oneself is very lonely; I don’t recommend it.

I learned Flixel over the weekend, and I now know that my brain is the Flixel-compatible type. The whole thing makes very good sense to me and feels familiar. It’s interesting that everyone seems to fall distinctly into one of two camps, people who get Flixel and people who get FlashPunk. It would be interesting to investigate how these two classes of people are different, in ways other than programming. For instance, do we all like the same movies?

My game is called Intercontinental Drift, and it’s posted here. Please play it and come back here to leave comments. The game and I have been in isolation all weekend, and we both thirst for a little human contact.

I think the game is kind of interesting, though it is unpolished and pretty incomplete. I never got a chance to make music or expand the levels very much. As usual, I didn’t start actually churning out chunks of gameplay (levels) until the last few hours. I need to work on this for future LDs, because it’s the most important part.

Cheers!

Hamburger

So happy I finished this!
It’s my first Ludum Dare, tho I’ve wanted to enter for a while. I’m on a new PC, so I had to download a lot of tools during the contest, which was quite annoying. Other things I’d do next time are:

• Get food in the house first! I survived on eggs and toast alone
• Plan tasks before starting
• Get a good idea?

I started off with few ideas, and hoped if I made a game jumping from island to island I could expand upon the theme a bit. I expanded on the game play, but the island theme itself was never explored any further, which is a little disappointing.

I’m glad I managed to do a title screen and music (first music I’ve done for a looong time), and the game has a sort of ending. I managed to work quite quickly as I stuck to a low resolution and only 16 colours. It’s a palette I’m quite used to, but I had to make some adjustments to add a skin tone in half way through drawing.

Off for some much needed sleep now!

My first LD game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1884

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLILo6ZVoag

Here’s a timelapse for my 2h game, Island Balance. I’m very sorry about the music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvvT9Xcr4nQ

Not great quality, and as you can see I spend very little time with art assets and level editor. The video is only 1:09 long

Well, it’s over.  That was great!  This game turned out to be fun, though a bit chaotic.  Check it out!

The Forgotten Isles is my entry for the second Ludum Dare challenge I participated in. It is a simple game to play, using only the arrow keys to move your character around the island. Frustration will set in as you find out that the mazes become more and more complicated, but there is intrigue and mystery as to why you’re here.

This game has a lot to do with memories. As you wander the islands, you slowly lose more and more of your own. Some of them have manifested themselves in physical form throughout the mazes. These unintentionally serve as reminders of your past and help restore your memories, allowing you to continue to seek out an exit.

Lastly, the island itself doesn’t allow you to remember its own features, not for very long anyways. Terrain features only appear when you’re near to them. As you approach they’ll rise out up from the ground and when you walk away, they’ll disappear. This makes navigating a maze much more difficult.

The Forgotten Isles can be played on the web (Unity plugin) or downloaded for PC/Mac. Please take some time to explore the isles, and unravel the story.

(more…)

I finally added a main character to my game. It can’t do much, except walk around and jump (BTW: the jump sound is a glissando on my cello). The game isn’t finished unfortunately, you can’t complete it.

I also made some background music, using the sound samples I recorded earlier.

• Play the game here: http://www.wieringsoftware.nl/ld/MonkeyIslands/
• Source code: http://sites.google.com/site/mikewiering/LD17_Wiering.zip

Lots did not make it because of hilarious software shenanigans, but it’s here!

Featuring a mysterious historical protagonist and AWESOME GROUNDBREAKING evolutionary mechanics.

Also featuring: not music because I had something done in some weird format and Total Recorder exploded my computer.

I might add content later when the voting’s done. oh god the code is horrible Can’t wait to see what you guys have done.

Tools:

Flashdevelop

Flixel

Flan

sfxr

Photoshop

I’m extremely pleased with how my game turned out. The graphics are decent, the gameplay is fun, and there’s enough interesting content to keep you engaged for some fair amount of time. It lacks music, though; I just couldn’t figure anything that’d actually fit the game’s atmosphere. There are some retro-ish sound effects, however.

I do want to add a couple more features to the game over the next several weeks, then release it to the public as a revision of this original.

Fun facts: I spent appx. 30 of the given 48 hours coding. The game is just a bit under 2,000 lines of code. Since I just had dental work done, all of my meals were either potatoes or soup. I used only GIMP (for graphics), sfxr (sound), BlitzMax IDE/Compiler (coding), and ResHacker (setting the exe’s icon) for everything. My desk, as always, is yet a hopeless mess.

I didn’t have time to put a tutorial into the game, so I’ll explain a few things here for those having trouble.

1) On the map, we have a number of islands with one or more bases on each. The size of the base plays a bit of a role in its economy.

2) At any base, you can buy and sell any of the four commodities. When an island has commodity icons on it, those resources are cheaper at all bases on the island. Buying commodities drives up their price at that base, while selling them drives it down. The effect is bigger at smaller bases – big bases have more inertia.

3) The prices of commodities fluctuate randomly around a certain midpoint. When a base blinks green, the prices there have been updated.

4) You can mouse over a base to compare its (sell) prices to those at your current location. Clicking a base makes it your destination.

5) Having selected a destination, you can choose a mode of transport to get you there. More expensive modes of transit are more reliable (fewer breakdowns), more secure (fewer pirates) and/or faster. Only aerial modes of transport can get you between islands.

6) Pirates become more common later in the game, so you don’t get too screwed early on. If hauling a load of minerals in the late game, though, you’ll want to take a tank or rocket.

7) When time runs out, you’re allowed to reach your destination (if in transit) and will automatically sell any commodities you’re carrying.

At the beginning of the game, you can only carry 4 units, but you can upgrade your carrying capacity. It gets more expensive the bigger you make it.

Better instructions will follow! Just rushing this out in time for the voting. Post any questions as comments and I’ll try to answer them.

I managed to finish Voyage of the Queen.

I decided to try something 2D this time rather than my usual 3d to get something a bit more cerebral and less action.  It was written in silverlight which made it really easy to make nice GUI screens but I was doing low level blitting to do the boat sailing graphics. I had more plans for this game such as gaining crew, having more events other than pirates and upgrading the ship but the tile engine took more time than I thought and I didn’t really get around to the actual gameplay until Sunday. It was a little scary at the end because I had a really obtuse error message (Thanks Microsoft) that resulted in crashing at the trade and ship cargo screens about an hour before finish but I managed to fix it in time.

My compo entry is here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1128

Sorry, I didn’t report any progress on day two. But I’m gonna write a post-mortem and upload my timelapse as soon as possible to make it up to you guys. I was nearly giving up until about 6 hours earlier, but my motivation returned after I finally got my robot guy to animate. So here is my entry:

It’s Windows-only at the moment (source included in the ZIP file), I’ll try to make ports for Linux and Mac OS X (Intel only) available in the next 12 – 24 hours, but I need some sleep first.
I didn’t have much time to playtest, so balancing might be a bit off and if there are any bugs let me know.

Yeah, I’m a few minutes late – but in my defense, those last few minutes were linker errors. In my mind, I made a game in under 48 hours so I win.

Of course there’s no winning condition in the game, but still.

Hosted here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50837/LD17.zip

That’s the source code and .exe. Have fun!

A randomly-generated map.

A very basic title screen.

I wasn’t able to finish implementation of much of my game, but I was pleased that I persevered and delivered something. It was nice to be able to make something less scruffy in terms of artwork, and I had fun LDing in a social environment.

Congratulations to all who entered!

Here’s my timelapse for the weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytucXyhmyA

My finished entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1066

I’ll probably write a post-mortem this week.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you on the MUD.

Ah to be finished with yet another LD. It feels good. My entry is called Eyelands . Basically you are a guy stranded on a large island in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of angry natives.  The idea at the beginning was for it to be a very open-ended game that would be fun to explore and discover stuff. It still has some of that but not nearly to the level that I had envisioned.  Anyway, should you decide to play it, try to hang on for at least 2 minutes (the day to night cycle time in the game).

My Entry for LD17

Finally, finished!

I’m quite happy with what I achieved this weekend – despite various bugs that I struggled with for ages, I managed to get a few cool features in there. I’m just hoping that it actually runs on most machines…

Thanks for a good (but tiring!) weekend. The final result is here. And now, I need to sleep… night!