I worked on AVOIDAL for 26 hours and took screenshots every 30 seconds. This three minute timelapse video is the result. There were a few times I forgot to restart my timelapse so there are a few tiny things missing but most of all the interesting asset creation (like graphics and sfxr and music) is in there.

Here is my timelapse for AVOIDAL on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtZNylG74M

Wow, that was intense! It’s always the same, you figure there’s AGES left, and you have all these plans for different types of enemies, scripted events, attack waves, whatever. And then suddenly there’s one hour left and you have to do this mad scramble to put it all together into something resembling a game.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. I’m not entirely sure how fun it is, but I certainly had fun making it which I suppose is all that counts. The lasso turned out to be AWESOME. Verlet integration is cool. There was a very definite ‘moment’ during the development, when it went from ‘a screen with two men on’ to suddenly an actual fun game.

And adding some basic AI navigation suddenly seems to make everything spring into life. It’s a shame the “pathfinding” (hah!) is so terrible. I was planning to go for a very “Bubble Bobble” feel to the thing, but I guess I would have needed another week to make that

Pics!

I didn’t really have a playable game at the time of the deadline, but I thought I’d share my game’s current status.

DOWNLOAD CURRENT PLAYABLE DEMO (Windows executable)

Enemies following and some musical instruments.

So the competition is over now!  Hopefully everyone got done what they needed to.  I ran a little short on time, but managed to come out with a fairly playable game.  You are Fromulus, an elemental wizard.  Your goal is to use the elements on the enemies to get them to kill each other.

Pew pew

Press Z to shoot and X to cycle between Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.  Each has its own abilities (except for Earth, which I didn’t complete, so it just shakes the screen).

Water can freeze enemies, which make good obstacles and heavy paperweights.

Fire makes the enemies scream and run about, setting their brethren on fire, too.

Earth does bupkis.  But it looks pretty cool, in a generic shake-the-screen sort of way.

Air turns your opponent into a screaming projectile.

Anyways, that’s my game!  Hope you enjoy playing it!  I’d love to hear any and all feedback.

…It’s been emotional. Well, not so much emotional as tiring and mildly stressful. Hell of a lot of fun though.

For my first forray into the Ludum Dare I managed to make a fully functioning prototype with only two known bugs, neither of which even come close to breaking the game. =D
It was actually a fairly substantial game given the time, I’m pretty proud of it.

Brace yourself for the upload of my Timelapse at some point tomorrow (it’s actually uploading as I speak) and a post-mortem at some point during the week. Probably saying that next time I’ll use an actual engine and a different language.

But for now, I think it’s time for sleep. Good night.

I have an almost playable game ready 1 hour past LD48 compo deadline. I got to the point I regret not staying up all night Saturday and spending too much time fiddling with the graphics. The game is a real-time game where bugs are trying to breach the reactor shield kamikazee style. You can operate various gates to redirect the bugs away from your reactor and into each other. When all the bugs have destroyed each other you advance to another level. Next compo I need to spend less time on graphics.

I used Python/Pygame and PSE8 for graphics.

In case you didn’t see the comment on PoV’s meetup post (or if this one’s easier to find), here’s the video of the New England Ludum Dare 18 Meetup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAC4fnobGI

Good stuff. Jonny D, HybridMind, and billknye were able to attend. We wound up at a great place, Me & Ollie’s in Portsmouth, NH, and much fun was had.

I managed to finish a playable game! I’m quite surprised as things weren’t looking bright when I wasted most of my first day doing nothing and the gameplay seemed to be going nowhere and I had only cube placeholders as graphics. But in the end I’m really glad I finished it and in fact I’m even having fun playing it which I wasn’t really expecting. It’s the magic of Ludum Dare: if you don’t give up, in the end it’s totally worth it!

All done!  Check it out, yo.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=654

Game submitted.  I didn’t hit everything I wanted to but I made a game!  Wow, that was a lot of hard work.  I learned a lot.  Tried to do a lot and in the end I like what I created.  I’ll do a post mortem after I sleep.  Until then, check it out here!

Cat Splat!

Timelapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp2nG1q5ncA

And photos beneath the fold:

(more…)

Judging is on!

On the voting page, all participants are assigned 20 random games. If you can make an effort to play and rate these games, then we’ll get a good distribution of votes for all games. The more games you play, the higher your placement on the “Coolness” charts. The list will grow as you play more.

If a competition participant forgot to include source, please don’t down-vote them, but politely remind them to include it. All verified, thanks sfernald.

Interesting Links

- ** MEETUP ATTENDEES! CLICK HERE!! **
- Number of competition entries in the final minutes
- Watch the Keynote, hosted by Mike Kasprzak (PoV)
- View the Theme Voting Results
- The “ALL GAMES” wallpaper by ExciteMike *NEW*
- Question: Did you like the Jam? *NEW*

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, deskphoto, timelapse

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hMrucsHzaQ

Windows Binary (in a zip): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4237397/Squibble%20Attack.zip

Source (requires SDL and Cairo to compile: http://github.com/acdimalev/acdimalev-competition-ludumdare18

Game submitted.

play it!

It’s currently 4:51 (am) and my game is completed, you can probably play it online here. Now I’m gonna sleep and then upload more food photos

I’ll probably write a lengthy post-mortem compensating for the fact that I forgot starting chronolapse and my mot using twitter (I’m on a smaller screen than normal so I need that space)

If anyone wonders how I got the name of the game… ask or browse the source

Check it out!
I have to say I’m pretty pleased when comparing the number of personal firsts with the final result of Ludum Dare #18. My first time creating something using Canvas and JavaScript, my first Ludum Dare, my first competition and my first finished game (?!). There really isn’t anything like a deadline to get yourself in gear.

Cheers to everyone in IRC and everyone involved in setting up Ludum Dare. It’s been a fun and productive 48hrs. Good luck to all entrants and commiserations to everyone who didn’t quite make it. Can’t wait to see the theme for #19.

Well, my first LD comes to an end.

A couple of minutes before the deadline, and most of my game was incomplete.

So I added a few screens and events to wrap it up  in something like a game and I submitted it anyways.

I would feel pretty sad If after I worked all the weekend I ended up without submition, so here it is my game:

¨Enemies, (Such) as Weapons.¨

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?uid=2503

Even as I failed to myself, This was very fun!!
I really enjoyed to read the blog as everyone were progressing!  I’m definitely entering this thing again.

Good luck to everyone!

… sorta.

My game submission for Ludum Dare 18 is called Bouncing Bellyfloppers. The object of the game is to constantly and creatively rearrange trampolines to reflect bellyflopping obese guys back at the helicopters from whence they came. You know you want to play it. It looks a little like this:

One thing I learned during my development for this competition is that my own framework is rather limited. It’s pretty good for 2D games, but as soon as I considered doing something 3D, I found that it would take quite a bit of time to implement, and time is short. Hopefully I can implement some basic model loading and such before the next Ludum Dare rolls around. I was happy that I picked an idea that allowed plenty reasonable time to create, though.

Super Collide-Em-Up is finished.

Entry page.

My toy is done! (actually it has been done & submitted for a few hours now) It has no goal, thus why it’s more of a “toy” than a game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=2421

It is played in the browser, because it’s a Java applet. It should work wonderfully in Windows and Linux with Sun Java 1.6.0_10 or newer. There is a link on the page to a Mac version but it’s iffy at best. Sorry Apple users, upgrade to a superior OS. In all seriousness though I wish I could’ve gotten it completely cross-platform. I feel like that would deserve a gold star or something.

Anyway I’m … content, I guess. Not entirely pleased, but not displeased either. And I’m sure this wasn’t bad at all for my first Ludum Dare. I learned some things:

• Games need a goal. Next time I will plan to make a game, not a toy. I can’t believe I didn’t see this from the get-go.
• Do something out of the ordinary. This game ended up frighteningly similar to the game that my group created at the Global Game Jam earlier this year. I became pretty depressed the moment I realized this fact, only a handful of hours before the end of the competition. I am an extremely uncreative person when it comes to ideas, and this discovery only underscored that fact.
• Preparation is good. I’m talking about the time before the competition. School started this past week for me, but it didn’t start until Wednesday. What did I spend Monday and Tuesday doing? Not preparing for Ludum Dare, that’s what. Next time I need to actually prepare, because I spent a lot of time writing code that could have been prewritten as a library. I think my game would be much better if I had done that.
• Breaks are good, too. I think I paced myself pretty well; I’m exhausted but not beat. But it definitely helped that I took breaks. I got plenty of sleep both nights, and I even stopped to bake cookies. I made sure to keep very calm and not rush or overexert myself. I think I did a pretty good job with this but I definitely want to keep it in mind in the future.

Well that’s about all I have to say about that. Good luck to everyone! I got a lot out of this weekend. I’m working on my timelapse video now, and I’ll either edit this or make a new post when I put it up on the Tube of You.

Birds of Prey screenshot 1