A bit late to post this, but I thought the submission entry would show up on the blog.

So yea, the game is finished and submitted. You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2311

Enjoy!

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

After hours of hectic development by myself, Bartbes, Roybie, Textmode and thelinx, the LÖVE-PARTY is proud to present: Fistful of Beef!

Click the pretty screenshot to see a gameplay video!

As was explained in a previous post, the objective is to destroy all cattle by catching a bull with your lasso, swinging it around your head and smashing all the other bovine scum to pieces – preferably as quickly as possible!

We were off to a horrible start, and after the first 24 hours, none of us really thought we’d get anything done in time. But here we are, some 45 hours later, and we now have a pretty cool little game! A proper post mortem will be posted tomorrow, but for now, we’d just like to get some sleep. Have fun playing the game and please do leave a comment.

Go play the game!

The LÖVE-PARTY, out!

Made timelapse and gameplay videos. Even though I didn’t have enough time to finish the game this LD was lots of fun again for me

timelapse

gameplay

Yeah I ‘finished’ in time for the Jam! (Okay so I just tacked on lives/game over, and avoided all polish I’d hoped to add, but it’s fully playable now!)

I hope you enjoy it

entry page

I finally made it ! Abemus windows binary. Now you don’t have any reason to not try it out

bye

Just made these two videos. One is the timelapse video I took to show my development process and the other is to show off the gameplay for those that cant run flash (Linux) or dont want to actually play the game, just want to see what the fuss is about

The timelapse was produced using 2300 ish screenshots, one taken every 60 seconds by Chronolapse.

Enjoy:

Timelapse

Gameplay

You can play the game here: http://mikecann.co.uk/ludum-dare/ludum-dare-hour-40-complete/#thegame

I’ve been too busy at work and at home (and sleeping this afternoon ) to write a post-mortem yet, but now I’ve finally got some time – so I’ll just jot down some quick lessons learned…

The previous time I participated in Ludum Dare I spent a lot of time designing a very complex puzzle game, it was so complex that I failed to complete development of the features needed to build interesting levels and gameplay… so this time round I went in the opposite direction and hardly did any design at all, fearing that I won’t be able to finish an entry. So this time round my game is pretty much feature complete – it’s just not much fun !

Once I’d finished coding all the features, I found that it was quite time consuming and difficult to build interesting puzzler levels, I think this stemmed from a number of problems:

• Enemy features were not interesting enough
• There wasn’t enough interesting interactions between enemies
• I was quite tired / sleep deprived by the time I started on level design
• Designing good puzzles takes time, I think the time constraints on this competition maybe make puzzle games a poor genre choice (too dependent on good content)

I also had boatloads of problems with publishing my entry, I wanted to do Java Applet or JNLP, but I still haven’t gotten around to either – both are a bit difficult to get working, so this is something I should figure out how to do before competition as part of setting up my tool chain.

So my list of things to do differently next time:

• 48 hours is a long time (6 work days) – even if you lose 12 hours to sleep, etc. you still have 4.5 days.
• Following from the above:  spend at least 4-8 hours on design at the start (including level design on paper) you’re too tired in the last 8-16 hours to design fun levels then.
• Tool-chain setup should include testing web publishing of the game.
• Puzzle games are a poor choice of genre, rather do something more arcadish with running or jumping or shooting.

All that said, I’m still quite satisfied that I managed to complete an entry – flawed though it may be… I can’t wait for LD19 as I definitely have lots of room for improvement!

A patched version is now available. (only minor bugfixes/crash issues updated).
you can get the updated binary and source here:

http://pixelsiege.net/Hacking4DummiesPatched.zip
http://pixelsiege.net/Hacking4DummiesPatched_Src.zip

Please note that your vote has to be based on the unpatched compo-binary.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=2196

So this is my second Ludum Dare and I’m now declaring my first failure. My game project was too ambitious. I’ve done loads of work on it and it’s really coming together but there’s no way I’m going to be done even for the jam deadline without rushing it out and I don’t want to do that as I think it’s going to be a nice little title.

Guess I’ll post on the blog later this week when it’s done. NEXT time I will make sure it’s something I can do in 48 hours.

Who wants a wallpaper made out of thumbnails from all the LD games?

This here python script (and png for the LD logo) will generate them in various sizes for you.

example output:

Once all the jam entries roll in, I’ll run it and make a post with wallpapers in various sizes for download.

It also dumps a non-resized-for-wallpaper grid.png and an xml file containing each game’s author, game id, title, etc. that maybe someday I will have a good use for.  You can quickly customize it or update for future LDs by changing the variables at the top of the file.

It requires this Python module which you may have to download and install.

EDIT:  whoops, I had a stupid bug in the part that was supposed to center the thumbnails within their grid cells and instead right-aligned ‘em.  It’s fixed if you download now.

Bac-Attack is a little action based game, where you assume the role of a virally infected bacterium, and you have the ability to spread your virus among the healthy bacteria, from simply coming in contact with them helps spread the virus which can then spread even further.

So your main enemy is the antibacterial spray which a clean freak is spraying in order to make sure their house is clean, now be careful not to get in the line of the spray as it’s deadly to bacteria, which generally results in your demise.

Healthy bacteria also harms you when coming in contact with it, only slightly though as they aren’t a major threat, also when hurt you will slowly regenerate your health back. 

So LD18 is now my 3rd Ludum Dare that I’ve taken part with and I swear it’s my best yet, it’s the most finished a game I’ve developed has been (excluding games I make outside of LD of course) and for that I’m happy. Of course there are lots of things I would change now looking at the game, but that will always happen when working on a game, especially when in a little time frame.

I made the game in Game Maker 8 as some may have guessed, I’m not an excellent coder like most of you on here, but I love the fact that I can take part in this competition thanks to Game Maker, games are my life and I’m happy I can spend spare time making games in 48 hours.

I will be writing up a post mortem for the LD blog, which I will attempt to write in my little spare time that I’m not at work.

I hope you enjoy my game, and I look forward to playing everyone else’s games!

Still jamming away. Got the writing and code all done. Now I’ve just got to do backgrounds and title screen. Looks like I’ll be speed-painting them somehow (there are 13! EEP!!!)

Screenshot (sans background):

So we finally submitted our sourcecode you can find the link here: CLICK

I’m glad with the JAM, I might even get something playable done this time!

So this is it. I started looking for ways to make my game more interesting 3 hours before the deadline, then I made 8 new maps in half an hour (you can imagine the quality work ), but finally decided that the game wasn’t fun enough to be submitted to the compo. Plus I was too tired to do all the packaging and stuff.

It’s still playable and almost fun, so I submitted Stupid Squares to the Jam (Linux, FreeBSD and Windows builds available).

I don’t want to work on this anymore for the moment, so there’s almost no change since the compo deadline. If you’re bored, you can try to create fun maps…

Hi people, I couldn’t make it into the main compo, so I am goint to enter the jam instead.

You move the ship (ball with a yellow star) by moving the mouse, and have to make the turrets fire at you so you can avoid the bullets and have them hit other turrets. You also have a shield (hold left mouse button) which reflects bullets avoiding damage, but it drains energy which is slowly replenished. When there is only one turret left you win.

For now there are only two simple levels implemented.

You can try a working version here:

http://www.gemserk.com/prototipos/dudethatsmybullet-webstart-release/launch-webstart.jnlp

this url always has the latest “released” version and is updated as I work.

hope you like it.

Ruben – Blog

Woooo hoooo I finished my game. Overall it was a great learning experience and I even got to a point where I ALMOST gave up. I’m really happy that I stuck with it, got past “the wall” and polished it until it was done.

You can view my entry here and I would be grateful for your comments.

Streaming flash video, high score list, downloads and web version here:
http://www.orangeview.net/puzzabomb/

Use the arrow keys to move.

PuzzaBOMB in action!

PuzzaBOMB is a simple action-puzzle game. The objective is to lure the time-bombs toward castles which contain powerups. Collect the glowing powerups to go the to next level.

When a bomb is flashing red, it is about to explode!

Features: Five levels, including a “speed round” where the bombs get really spammy. Hand-painted textures. Music featuring me on electric bass and mandolin. Online high score database using php and mysql. Really damn high framerates. nVidia Physx rigid body physics simulation. And lots of explosions!

Programmed entirely in javascript.

There are three versions available:
- Windows (does not require shockwave: uses directX)
- Mac OSX (does not require shockwave: uses openGL)
- Online (in any browser: uses adobe shockwave)

You can get Adobe Shockwave here:
http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/

Have fun, and thanks for playing! This was a blast to make. Ludum Dare ROCKS.

I have really loved playing everybody’s games and reading your posts. This was a wonderful experience and I’m grateful for PoV’s hard work hosting it.

Kindest regards,

- Breakdance McFunkypants

P.S. Double ZOMBIE Rainbow! =)

Architector (compo page link)

This was one hell of a weekend. This is my second Ludum dare, and the experience from the first one shows. I spent a lot more time doing and a lot less time learning this time around. Compare: LD17, The Naturalist

I panicked a bit when I saw the theme, it didn’t inspire me too much at first. But in the end it did make for a pretty funny weapons system. The end result is something like Kirby meets Sburb meets Tuper Tario Tros and they have a pixelated child in some horrible freak accident.

I liked:  Getting results faster than last time with Flixel and actionscript 3. Having music this time around, it’s pretty nice to have a piano plugged in. The little red dragon running all over the place at incredible speeds due to some bug during development.

Didn’t like: Composing music for the first time during the last few hours; I really should have practiced that. It was also a bit hard to make sure the game was playable and not too confusing. Naming this in the last half-hour.

Overall I surprised myself, I didn’t think I could do this much.

Check it out!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1540

I promised a lengthy post and I guess this is it…

This is a screen of my post-compo game, a few things changed. Play, comment and read the full list of changes here.

Today I spent most of my day sleeping and making the post-compo version with a few bugfixes. Next compo, december probably, I’ll use my own chronolapse that will rock, and will be out of my way. I’ll also write a tool or two that compensate for actionscrip not having templates/generics, and add a few base classes that make the flixel game development even faster.

I’ll probably do food shopping on thursday/friday instead as that is taking up too much precious time

The only other bad thing I did was not making the graphics at the start, and instead used temporary graphics for most of the compo. The good thing about this is that I focused on gameplay early on, the bad side is that I spent too much time tweaking and playing the game. With these changes I might have a showable game earlier, allowing me to get feedback from irc/other people instead of post compo feedback; and this good folks, really is the only thing that I want

Food photo times, you know you want to hit more… (more…)