Alas, it was not to be. With 1 hour and 23 minutes remaining I see no chance to turn this into something playable.

Perhaps if I had spent more time implementing gameplay instead of thinking about it…

Oh, and it’s hard to see in the screenshot, but there’s an accompanying laser sound made with SFXR. To everyone still working: “Use it. Now.”

Oh crap. It’s actually nearly finished. (ish).

I’m just adding another level.

I am pretty happy with how Smores Attack came out in the end, although it is not as fully featured as I had hoped.  With my first LD done, now I understand the basic issues I am likely to face making an applet game.  I have made a bunch of games before, but I hadn’t made a sprite-based, flash-looking applet game in a while, and dealing with the initial graphics setup in Java took the vast majority of my time, effort, and motivation to get through.  I had to throw away 2-3 attempts at getting the sprites to render correctly, but finally I achieved success. 

Once I had that done, making the game itself was pretty easy and fun.  I can see why so many people start with frameworks now, although I think it is really rewarding to not start with one because then my game doesn’t have all this other overhead that it doesn’t need (I’m sure it’s not as optimized as I could make it anyhow, but still it’s pretty small for what it is).  The background color change was the smartest move… the characters really pop off the screen with the blue background vs. red.  My time lapse shows the heavy editing necessary to draw the animations, many of which I didn’t have time to implement. 

time lapse video

I’m so not going to finish ….

well not done, but i can’t work on it any longer. SLEEP TIME

compo page here.

i didn’t get up to adding lots of things i planned, or spending any time on sound. i quite like it though, might have to keep working on it after LD..

Well, that was interesting

My first Ludum Dare but surely not my last. It’s been more fun, more rewarding and a lot tougher than I expected. I have awesome amounts of respect for anyone else who completed their entry, particularly if they got everything in it that they intended.

I’ve also ended up making a completely different game from what I had in mind on completely different tech. I had been planning to use jMonkeyEngine with Blender for 3D but none of the 3D game ideas I had really fitted the theme.

Unfortunately, the game has no sound I simply ran out of time. If I had worked ridiculous hours, I might have got sound in, but I might not have finished the gameplay or got all the bugs out of it.

My Entry

so I got my things together. (already found some small things i overlooked, but atleast no bugs )

Here are my results:

Get the Game: http://pixelsiege.net/Hacking4Dummies.zip

Get the Game + Source: http://pixelsiege.net/Hacking4Dummies_Src.zip

Get my Timelapse (was stopped during sleeping periods) http://pixelsiege.net/Timelapse_LD48_18.zip

The player now has a skeleton companion and clicking him will let the player control him with the mage on AI. The peasants seem way too weak now.

Still lots more to do so this will end up being a jam game. Maybe I’ll have time to fix the sound library compilation or find a new sound library.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get any time off work so I had to cut my dev time a little short. I’m hoping to work on it a bit tomorrow for the Jam, but for now, this is all I have – it’s very nearly a game! To be added: sfx, lives, game over, and some other tweaks.

Arrow keys – left/right/up. Avoid bad things and collect strawberries. The bull kills the ghosts/you (don’t worry it kind of makes sense in-game!)

Any feed back welcome!

SO. TIRED. D:

Anyway, check it out here:
CLICK ME

I’ll check out the rest of your guys entries in a couple hours when I’m done recuperating.

My game, with less than two hours till the end of LD48, has terrible balance issues. It would take much more time than I have to fix. I’m going to package up what I have, and send it out into the wild. I suppose there’s not much I can do.
I had a great first compo though.

I’m out of time, so my entry is officially done. Go play it!

(Windows only; sorry!

This game was inspired by the “Land of the Dead” movie, where a zombie starts to get smart and command the others against humans. You turn your ENEMIES (people) into WEAPONS (more zombies to help you killing more people).

It was great to learn the JGame engine for Java. It’s a little buggy right now (and those bugs will reflect in my game), but anyway it is a great engine in terms of development speed and ease of use!

Also, it was my first real LD (I’ve submitted an entry to #16 by I prefer to ignore its existence…) and I can say it was a great experience!

Yep, I’m finished. True to form, I spent half of Saturday writing a toy, then a day and a half buffing it to a needless shine and building up unnecessary cruft around it. Double Bounce is a simple physics puzzle, a sort of mash-up between air hockey, pool, and putt-putt golf. Give it a play and you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, it’s got rad particle and blending effects, plus easy-to-use tools to let players create, share, and rate levels.

Whee! It's not a bacterium, I swear.

Now, off for some (much-needed) sleep.

Give Double Bounce a play!

*Collapses*

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=150

Please read the “Disclaimer” before eating my face off.

Night”

Alright, finished up my shmup. My attempts at making music for it failed miserably, so I’ve left it music-less… but the gameplay seems to work well enough, and while still shots look sorta iffy, it looks nice enough in motion.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1503

Turns out that using full 3d physics and graphics engines for a game with entirely 2d gameplay isn’t worth the added effort… ah well lesson learned.

Good luck to everyone still scrambling for the deadline!

Two hours to go, and I have added background music and eye candy. Still no scoring or enemy bullets.

I really need to work on setting priorities.

Wenemies is as finished as it will ever be in this compo.  Perhaps later, when I have more time and less Carpal Tunnel, I will update it.

View the Entry Page, watch a short gameplay video, visit the project’s spartan Website, or watch the Time-Lapse Video.

Evaluation: The idea for the game shaped up during the course of programming.  I had wanted to spend an entire night just thinking about the concept, then come up with a better game; my restlessness however took over, and I began coding almost immediately.  I’m certain the simpleness of the concept shows this.  I also had a long day of fighting in the mix, so my time was limited, especially as I was out of shape and therefore unable to continue that night.  In the future, I must clear my weekend entirely.  Pygame was a pleasure to work with, especially for a 2-d game such as this, and I will either expand my skills on this for the next compo, or attempt an understanding of Ruby or Scheme.  Learning packaging was non-trivial, but necessary, and I have a Windows version available as a result.  All in all, I did okay—I could have done better, but I did complete something.

This is the first ever finished game to be written entirely in HAL, the editor / scripting language I’ve been working on for six years. The project really helped me see what I need to do to improve the language and tool, so for that it’s been invaluable. I’m reasonably happy with how quicky I could get new content in with it.

Here’s a screenie, to whet your appetite – would love to get your feedback over on the submission page!

Link to the entry page.

Well, I’m throwing in the towel for LD. Maybe I’ll wrap some stuff up tomorrow so I can at least get it out for the Jam. My problem is that on Friday, I was forced into mowing the lawn after explaining that any time was fine except for this weekend. Then I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning trying to get even a bit done but ended up doing little but working in circles trying to get an idea and later in the night just struggling to stay awake. So I went to sleep for 3 hours, and made painfully little progress on Saturday. I was so tired I decided to just sleep for as long as I was tired and slept from 11 to almost 9. Productivity today skyrocketed, but 14 hours just wasn’t enough to get it all done. I’m so close to being finished, but there’s simply no way for me to squeeze it into 2 hours, especially considering how tired I’m starting to get and how fed up I am with the bizarre bugs I’m getting after making some minor changes to make the enemy templates get read from a moddable external file rather than the hard code. So this is thanks for the motivation to get back working on a game I started a while back and a cruel insult because you stole my sanity yesterday. Oh, how I wish I had just gone to sleep Friday night ;(