Just wanted to share my late Mini LD 21 game with everyone:

Klaustrum is a game about the fear of having no escape and being closed in. GreaseMonkey was kind enough to whipped the music in less than an hour and DirkRugged helped with the levels.

We are planning to flesh out lot more levels, tweak the gameplay, etc. and use it as our entry for PoV’s October Challenge. Please have a run at it and let us know what you think: http://legrudgerugged.com/klaustrum/

It looks like the days of just 9 countries able to sell Android apps has finally ended.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/more-countries-more-sellers-more-buyers

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

Very interesting. Just in time for October 1st.

I have the game physics working now. You can grab a Windows version at:
WhopIt!

Please read the README.txt, because the PC input differs from the iPhone one.

I finally managed to get the corners auto-rounded to avoid very steep angles.

So today’s officially the last day of September, which means it’s time to throw in my lot with the October Challenge folks. What were you thinking, PoV? Challenging the Ludum Dare to make a game? In a month? One game?

I think we can handle this.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been hacking away on a medium-sized iPad game; I hadn’t planned on finishing it by October 31st, but (with your collective permission) I’m upping my deadline and making it my October Challenge entry. So, without further ado, I present, for the iPad-owning, grand-strategy-loving among you: Distant Star

You did play Master of Orion, didn't you?

Distant Star is an old-school 4x game (a la Master of Orion or Sword of the Stars) for the iPad. It’s a turn-based strategy game in which you explore the galaxy, assembling massive fleets to conquer your opponents and terraform their planets. Starting from a single system, you build starships, research new technologies, and colonize distant star systems — but you’re not alone in the galaxy. There are other races out there, with radically different needs, abilities, and psychologies.

</pitch>

Look! It works in vertical, too!

Thanks to the couple of weekends and odd evening I’ve put in so far, the core of the game is more-or-less complete. You can build ships, assemble them into fleets, and move those fleets between systems. Obviously, there’s a lot of critical stuff left to write: the AI system is just a shell, the research/tech tree aspect is completely non-existent, and the whole thing is entirely devoid of graphical shininess. I’ve also made my life significantly more difficult by attempting to support multiple orientations, but with some slight glTranslate/glRotate cleverness, this shouldn’t be too hard.

I have to confess: I’m not really making Distant Star for the October Challenge. I’m making Distant Star because I happen to have an iPad and I want to play an old-school 4x game on it. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn’t seem to exist, so I suppose I’ll just have to write it myself. Worse things have happened.

Anyway: Distant Star, coming for the iPad in early November! I’ll be writing more about it as things progress, over at Expat Games

Well, I guess I’m in. This is a great idea for a challenge, and a little spare cash would be nice for a strapped-for-cash student like myself. Even if I lose money, the experience alone will be worth it.

I’ve purchased a developer membership on the Android market and I’ve got a Google Checkout merchant account in the works (still need to wait for that verification deposit to show up). Right now, I’m getting the eclipse ADT plugin setup and getting a Hello World program going. My first impressions are pretty positive.

As far as the game goes, it’s going to involve bubblewrap, and it’s going to be awesome. I don’t want to give too much a way, but let’s just say that the focus on bubblewrap is a bit tongue-in-cheek and the actual gameplay should be pretty enjoyable.

As far as my skillset goes, neither games or Java are my strong points. Ouch! I’ve used Java in school, but never in my personal time. I have spent a lot of personal time in game development, both in SDL and SDL/OpenGL, but I never really accomplished a big project (my biggest being a Pong clone with decent artwork and a somewhat decent AI). So October is going to be a challenge, but these are all things I’ve really wanted an excuse to learn so I’m looking forward to the rest of this month.

Stay tuned! And good luck everyone!

Afterthought of 9/30: Damn, I need a decent host if I want an online high score system.

Edit: Got one of those silly twitter things going: http://twitter.com/martinw89

GERRRRR i hate school!
im sorry but i probly wont be able to be in ludum dares for a while becaue of a over load of home work and stuff like that.

so dont wory (i dont know why you would though)

Reposted from my blog – figured my Ludum Dare friends might be interested.

If you are looking to experience the trials and tribulations of a bunch of fellow hard core weekend indie game developers hacking out a 48 hour game jam, there is one being held this weekend in Australia that promises to deliver live video feeds of all the action!

48hr Game Making Challenge

Like this month’s OrcaJam in Canada and the worldwide phenomenon that is Ludum Dare, 48 hour game-jams or compos are wonderful indie game developer festivals for those of us who love all things gamedev related.  Events such as these are perfect for networking, learning new techniques, and having tons of fun.  There are, however, NOT good for those looking to enjoy such luxuries as sleep, good food, or sunshine and fresh air.  Check it out and be sure to encourage them with positive comments.

I have a tendency to quit and restart alot.  Okay maybe not.  I haven’t ever really quit anything except for star-catcher, which might could say is just shelved for the time-being.  I’ve already officially started PoV’s challenge, and officially quit, and officially restarted again.  So I make a sub-challenge — Guess how many times I quit and restart.  The one closest to how many times I quit and restart will get a credit in all 3 games I am working on (a 4th project is a port and so I can’t really put you in those credits).  My current PoV Challenge game, my flash shoot’em up, and Hypno-Joe — provided any of these gets finished.  A quick qualifier — This first time I quit and restart didn’t count.  So a zero count means you don’t think I will quit and restart again.  1 means you think I will do it just once from now, and so on.

Here’s a bit of chat that started it:

<Uhfgood> I think I can honestly say that I can get this game, I was working with sgstair on, done in amonth
<Uhfgood> so you know… I might actually re-enter the challenge, provided I can rebuild this prototype in flashpunk in a short period of time
<Uhfgood> I wasn’t going to but because this actually looks doable
<Uhfgood> mrfun – I may have to end my reign of slacktitude
<mrfun> uhf, is it ok if we make a sub-contest guessing how many times you’ll quit and restart the contest?
<Uhfgood> mrfun – Yeah
<Six> mrfun: I call 6

Good luck, good luck to us all!

I think a picture says more than 1000 words (which would be 128 bytes), and a movie even more, so I just made a quick one. Sorry for bad accent.

Whop It – pre-alpha

(more…)

Admittedly it was so I could vote but also because I really felt I had to submit SOMETHING, so here’s one of those good ol’ “GreaseMonkey miraculously pulls something out of his arse” competition entries, featuring two tunes made in a minute each and two made in 30 seconds each (self-imposed limits). This may have had something to do with the fact that Vieko wanted some music for his entry. (I spent about an hour on that, which in tracked music terms is quite a lot.)

In this game, your greatest fear is missing a compo.

On a casual side note, there are zombies.

And yes, the music is listenable, albeit a bit simplistic, although if you love guitar chugging then the sound track will be perfect for you.

Check it out, it’s called “Missing a Compo” and for the screenshot I accidentally took a shot of nearly my whole primary screen.

Today started with me trying to install Sam HaXe (An asset packaging tool for Flash / haXe). After some fudging some things, I got it working, and it works great.

Then, later on, I played this game. It inspired me.

I’ve decided to change my concept somewhat and make an arena shooter with robots fighting.

The player will have a choice between a handful of robots, each of which they can upgrade in a handful of attributes. (Speed, rate of fire, etc.) There will also be a number of levels, each with different terrain. The player must fight their way through 10-25 waves of baddies (Haven’t decided on the actual number) and a boss in each level.

The game will be fairly fast-paced, but the difficulty settings will affect the speed that things move with. I will favor using more powerful baddies over massive hordes of them, as masses of “popcorn” baddies aren’t much fun after a while, I think.

At the moment, I’ve got sprites for three different players (The look of the game will be very simple) and a flash applet that displays a player character that rotates to point at the mouse. I’ve got haXe working, Sam HaXe packages my images correctly, and things are looking good!

Tomorrow, I’ll try to get some kind of player movement in.

- Mr. Dude

In this game, lil’ boy need to avoid getting GROUNDED and escape the supermarket where he’s injustly blamed for some mischief, avoiding the guardians in a MetalGear (’87) – style sneaky way.

14h spent so far, mainly on programming. I’m using Pygame (programming), Gimp (graphics), SFRX, Audacity (sfx), ZynAddSubFX (virtual keyboard).  The OS is GNU/Linux.

Trying to get with something playable for the miniLD over the standard 48h week-end delay – but I couldn’t turn down an invitation on saturday night

So far I have a basic scale2x top-view with scrolling (fixed-rated logic&render), tiled background, moving sprites, turbo-mode (FPS*3), the very beginning of a built-in background editor, and code is still maintainable Also there’s a psychedelic “drunk-mode” effect (drink to build-up courage, but lose your balance!).

I had spent a few days on learning Blender recently but for now I’ll still have to make do with my limited Gimp skills.

Oh, and I have some recorded screams for lil’ brothers from years ago. That breaks the “no prior art” rule but that complies with the “collaborate with a n00b” one

First first. As in my first at least.

Just googled, and found out that the greek word for “Fear of dogs” was Cynophobia, so that’s what I’m calling my FIRST game.
First completed game at least.. (I hope)

The story so far: I didn’t think I was going to participate in this thing yet because
1. I had other plans today
2. I hadn’t got any idea what kind of game I would make and
3. I’ve never made a game before, and have just started learning java in school.
But then
1. plans got cancelled
2. I thought I could make a game about my fear of dogs, and 3 is hardly an argument at all, right?

So I started my little project earlier this evening in game maker by creating a little red circle known as obj_player and made him walk around in a room filled with instances of obj_wall. Next, I made a dog (a circle in different colours with a tail) and named him obj_dog. If I ever get a real dog, I will definitely call him obj_dog.

So, I have a player and a dog (or dogs if I place more than one), what now? I found out that to add a little to the phobia-feel, I could make the dog(s) turn around to always look at the player. This prooved more difficult than I thought, and I sat maybe an hour calculating the players position relative to the dogs and some advanced sinus-to-degree-formulas that ended with the dogs never facing the right way and a divide-by-zero-error when the player and dog had same x-position. I was almost about to give up, but then I asked a good friend of mine who thaught me that I could just use a code called point_direction with the x and y values for each object and get the job done in two lines. So that’s where I am now, I can move around while a bunch of dogs are watching me as I go.
For Collaboration I might ask my roommate to make some music, or I’ll ask a dog to be my voice actor Or maybe vice versa..

I’m not sure where to go from here, but I think it will end up as either a puzzle game where you can’t go too near the dogs, or a “notgame” like the ones Jordan Magnuson are making, where I rant a bit about how scary and bad dogs are. Anyways, I’m learning lots of new stuff about the Game Maker Language! Screenshot-time (I may change some of the sprites later):

Uh oh…

Sit?

It’s a little late into the Mini-LD proper, but I’ve decided to post this.

After narrowing things down a bit, I’ve decided on a concept for my Mini-LD game.

I’m going to make an arena shooter structured a bit like Geometry Wars. It will use a similar abstract vector style (Though things will look fairly different).

Instead of leveling up and improving skills continuously, the player will play through a series of levels and buy weapons between them. Each weapon will be upgradeable, and the player will be able to equip a limited number of them at any given time. There will also be miscellaneous pieces of equipment that the player will be able to use.

Levels will be procedurally generated, and baddies will come in waves. Each wave will be generated with a different kind of arrangement, such as a wave with alternating types of baddies along the edges, or a ring of one kind of baddie in the center.

There will also be a boss at the end of each level. The boss will be chosen from a give set and given a handful of randomly-chosen weapons.

I will be writing in haXe and using Sam HaXe to process SVG images. I will make my graphics in Inkscape, my sounds in sfxr, and music in LMMS.

As I’ve said/bragged before, the time limit is out the window. Absolutely out the window.

Check the submission page here

I have a huge fear of heights. As mundane as that is, it carries over into my gaming- if I run a character too close to an edge, especially in 3D, my stomach drops. My goal was to recreate that feeling for everybody else, as best as I could.

I got my inspiration from a BBC Planet Earth episode, where I saw a mountain goat living its normal life on the sheer cliff of a mountain, and I thought about how frightening that would be for me.

I actually made the game last weekend, but I took some time to have a friend who had shown some interest at my last LD to write some music for me.

This was my second flixel game, so I was able to progress faster and spend more time on more interesting stuff, like gameplay and art.

Enjoy!

I think I neglected to mention in my last update that I am totally new to the ludum dare website, so I am somewhat unsure of the blogging etiquette. I am going to err on the side of too many posts, and let the admins unpublish my drivel if need be.

Last night was somehow productive even though it got off to a pretty horrible start. I spent the bulk of my time trying to come up with a way to use core data to save my progress, but then discovered that the api just has far too much overhead for my liking. After that, I got some progress on the UIScrollView control that I am using for my main editing area, but then decided that I didn’t like using UIKit at all and was going back to my standard openframeworks hacked together ui framework.

I burned another hour trying to get the software running in openframeworks, unfortunately it is pretty unstable in the github right now, and I was somewhat running out of energy. Eventually I got it though. The main bulk of my progress happened then, I got a scrollview that you can pan around, and started working on zoom features. My scrollview is not as nice as the apple one, but I think it will work alright.

I totally ran out of energy for coding, but I didn’t really want to go to bed, so I spent another hour pixeling interface details to use later. I imagine that is the approach I am going to take, pixeling as a break for my mind from coding.

I tried to go to sleep, but I must have had too much caffeine, because I couldn’t make it to bed until 1:30 am. Ah well, I think I can still hit my goal of getting the core of the app done this weekend, possibly without great graphics. That will give me a few weeks of tweaking to get it ready for the store.

I didn’t really fully explain the app yesterday, so I can do that right now as well. The core of the app is a cellular automata called wireworld, which is a bunch like conway’s life, but it is a bunch easier to create turing machines in it. In fact, people have created some really neat ones that solve primes and etc. There are two things that I am going to pack on top of my wireworld implementation. The first is that the automata will run at a user defined rate, say 120 step per minute X a clock multiplier. The second is that each cell in the system can be linked to the trigger of a synthesizer. I have a sample based synthesizer that is ready to go, and I started writing a clone of the dx7 that I might be able to jam in if I have time. There are some other features, but I think they will need to be excised for this weekend.

wireworld + dx7

The response to the October Challenge has been incredible! I think the one thing that’s most amazing about it: everybody gets it. Every appearance of it on the internet has encouraged a plethora of “I’m in!” or “It’s ON like Donkey Kong!” responses. I’ve had dozens of direct tweets and people hunt me down in IRC just to tell me how much they love the idea. Very awesome!

For October 1st, I’ll be setting up and doing a new post on the Ludum Dare site, explaining how we can keep a list of finished games (i.e. using the existing Ludum Dare competition system). I’m putting it off a few days so I can actually get started.

So lets get started.

I already have the business stuff done (been doing it for a few years now). I also already have dev program memberships and payment info registered with most platforms (iOS, AppUp, …). If you haven’t done this yet, you should. Paperwork takes time to ship, be received, and approved.

So me, I’m jumping right in to development.

I shouldn’t say my time is short, since I am a full-time independent developer (sorry students and dayjob folk). Still, I’m treating the next month as a fraction of that. Despite, I’m still expecting to take the entire month to finish. My “first sale” will likely not be until early November, as store approvals do take time.

I have a rough plan scribbled down in my notepad and sketchbook (and in my head). I’m going to create a game by combining several things I know extremely well, something I could (if crunching like a maniac) probably get playable during a traditional LD competition time-line.

Looking back, one of the things about the iPhone App Store I completely didn’t expect was something I want to call “Incremental Game Development“. Coming from a console games background, our games need to be finished and seriously tested before they ever hit the market. So I as a console developer did exactly that. Took 4 month, and finished a game. Around the same time, a game called Fieldrunners was released. This game is the gold standard of the Tower Defense genre available for many major mobiles (iPhone, PSP, DS). It was almost expected that between the three of us (Smiles, Edge, Fieldrunners), Fieldrunners was going to win the IGF Mobile, which they did. There is one thing few people remember though: Fieldrunners launched *WITHOUT* sound!

This was such a shock for me. I was filled with such jealousy as they flew by me in the charts. Who releases a commercial quality game without sound!? Why is it selling so well!? Then they did something else. They released an update with sound. Sometime later, they updated again… and again. Each update was welcomed by press coverage and created much buzz in the community.

What!

I look back now with much respect for Subatomic Studios, having taught me something I was blind to, coming from the Console games business. They are my choice example for what I consider Incremental Game Development. Pocket God is another title that grew and evolved dramatically over time, but it was Fieldrunners that woke me up to it.

Today there are plenty of monetization options in games. Redefining how we get paid redefines how we make games. So if we can start selling a game as soon as it becomes compelling and fun, then why not do that?

Incremental Game Development is not the beta/preorder model. It is like it, but it’s not a promise of future updates or a “fuller” game. It’s a way to gauge interest and fund further development. You make the most compelling foundation or vertical slice of your game you can, and sell it for a low price for a larger user base. So in essence, I am making an incremental game.

So Mike, what are you making?

A “Single Screen” 2D Platformer.

A traditional “Single Screen” platformer has the problem that: once you change the resolution or the aspect ratio, it no longer works. Mike, the crazy portability guy, couldn’t sleep at night if he was making a game for 1 screen resolution today. So what I’ll likely do instead is pick a general room size, and scale/scroll to something fitting on whatever the native display is.

There’s certainly more to it than that, but I’m generalizing. I have a list of choice elements I’m looking to add, and a bigger plan if things go well. But the goal of my design is something simple and open. Kind-of like how a roguelike is developed: You get the core game working, and iterate new features until it’s a Dward Fortress. I have a list of things I want to try, and will be playing it by ear all month long. At its core though, it will be a platformer, and it will have fixed sized rooms.

That is the current technical challenge ahead for me; A pretty easy one at that. The point is to be able to finish quickly, so I can look at it, and decide what it needs next (or what I’m in the mood to try).

Artistically, to save time, I’m strongly considering a main character in the style of the “bird things” from my TIGSource Comicompo page. This, but cleaner:

That’s all for now. It’s now midnight Friday (having LD start time Deja Vu), so it’s time for a bit of planning/prep before bed.

Ok, I am going to do this thing!

I am already breaking the rules at night one though, as I am not really going to be making a game. I have two in progress projects, one of which I am going to try to take over the finish line. The first big one is itch which is a graphical “programming” language for iphone. I dusted it off last night, and discovered that it is in desperate need of a rewrite, so that kinda spells doom for me getting it done. The second project is wireworld + a synthesizer, again for iphone. This project is only just started, so I can do it right the first time (ha, ha, ha)

Anywho, something to do. I am also taking a week long vacation in the middle of october to visit with my girlfriends family, so this may have some impact on the project.

my workspace

Also as an update, a picture of my workspace, and for dinner I ate a bunch of food from the little italy street festival that is happening down the block. Lucky for me this isn’t a weekend challenge.