But better late than never. It starts a few hours into my development as I was using fraps to capture the start, which failed badly. Without any further ado, I present my timelapse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbIu-Tmsf0

So we were joking back and forth in IRC, pokemon came up, and we thought ‘wouldn’t it be neat to have a game with creatures from the channel.’ So here’s the deal: this here Google Docs form will collect the stats on “your” creature, based on your personal view of yourself along with one or two special attacks. Then, this CSV export (in-browser view) can be dynamically loaded by your game to populate it with monstrous versions of us. This is free to use for anyone to make their game that little bit more dynamic. Don’t worry about being realistic, variance is good (and important). When using the data, you’ll probably want to apply some noise to it and maybe even expand on the creatures procedurally, as there’s not a lot of room for everyone to make something totally unique.

Suggestions for new creature and power types go to painquin@gmail.com

I’ve posted a postmortem of Dodger, my Ludum Dare 18 entry on my blog.

I’m in a weird mood today, so I decided to put forth a challenge to members of our #ludumdare IRC channel. Feel free to join us. The challenge is simple:

Make a game — take it to market — sell 1 copy (or license it, or earn $1 in ad rev)

Many of you have done the first part, but let’s go all the way this time. The simplest definition of a professional game developer is someone that has made money developing games. So lets create-us some new “professionals” and get some games out!

Think of this as a race (or a Nanowrimo for games+business). Have something new for sale and in a store by the end of October. And if you can sell a copy (or sign a licensing deal, or earn $1 in ad revenue), you win.

October ends 479 days, 16 hours, 10 minutes, 40 seconds ago

NOTE: Start anytime! The clock is ticking! If you’re blogging here, use the “PC #01” Category. I’ll give it a better name later. Come October, the Challenge takes over Ludumdare.com.

Take a compo game and polish it up, something you’re working on now, or start something new. Bottom line, finally make good on that goal to start selling games. Lets do this!

Discuss in the comments, or hit the jump for some store and market suggestions.

(more…)

This writeup is cross posted on my blog at STRd6.com

Sticking with the competition theme one of my biggest fears is a meaningless life. Not only that, but a meaningless eternity. Pictures for Sad Children has a very similar theme at times and it helped inspire parts of this game (though I couldn’t find a good way to work in “monster most vulnerable when heaving with sobs”). The game is written in JavaScript and uses HTML5 canvas, so you’ll need a modern browser to play it (FF, Chrome, Safari, IE9). Click the image or find it here: Quest for Meaning.

This was my first 2 day competition and I’ve learned some things. First, two days is a long time. Second, having real tools would make me very, very happy. Third, I thought that doing all the art and all the programming for a game would be hard, but it seems to use different parts of the brain, so when working on art the programming part of my brain is relaxing and vice versa.

This was the first moderately legit game that I’ve done all my own art on (title screen and chest graphics contributed by Lana). Also, my first game with a 4 color grayscale pallet. And additionally, my first major undertaking on the Pixie platform.

Working with the Pixie platform had some serious trade-offs. JavaScript is a surprisingly productive language with it’s functional and dynamic nature, but it has a harsh and brutal syntax. The platform libraries helped a lot to smooth some things out, and as they become more complete it will get better and better. Another advantage was the tight art and code integration. It was trivial to create an image and have it appear in the game seconds later. The biggest drawback of Pixie right now is that the code “editor” is pretty much just a text area. There are no tabs, no integrated source navigation, no auto-save, no version control, and all kinds of other terrible issues. Also, there is no real tile editor, though Noel Berry pioneered the way by using the pixel editor as a tile editor before, and the surprising thing is that it’s actually not too bad.

Using Pixie to make art is awesome, but the game “platform” is not fleshed out enough for me to recommend making an entire game in it to everyone yet.

A special thanks to everyone who helped playtest and discuss various elements of the game throughout it’s stages: Boltz, McGrue, DavMo, Lan, MW… props.

So check out the game and let me know what you think. By making heavy use of Pixie, especially in time limited competitions, I hope to really iron out the core usage scenarios and make it amazing.

The future is bright and full of meaning.

Flixel has displayed some really ugly sound latency that seems to be mostly performance-related. (Meaning that Flixel has too much overhead and sounds lag really badly)

With that being said, I’m planning to learn base AS3. That will mean doing something much simpler than what I’m doing now.

I’m not sure yet just what I’ll be making, but Foxen is shelved for now. I hope to get back to it at some point but for now it’s just not happening.

I’ll still be making something, and I’m going to stick to it being for the Mini-LD. I’m thinking about perhaps doing a shmup.

I’ll post when I have something. Probably when I’ve got a demo of some sort.

— Mr. Dude

Day 2, and I’m ready to get started.

Today I want to have some kind of baddies implemented. I’m probably just going to have one or two types of baddie (Most likely just one), but I’d definitely like to have a variety of them ready.

I’ll release another demo when I’ve got baddies done.

It’s the end of day 1 in my work on Foxen (Well, day 1 probably ended a few hours ago: It’s 2:30 AM here in the Eastern US)

I’ve got a player character who can walk, run, and jump as well as a test level that I made in a proper editor and have written a Python script to munge it (And eventually all of the levels) so that I can embed it in the SWF.

Anyone who’d like to play it can do so here. (It’s a Flash game, so you just need Flash to play it)

So here’s my first (mini) Ludum Dare submission. It’s a week early, but due to Sophie’s leniency on this month’s rules and the fact that I’m going to be busy the next weekend, I thought I’d best get it done now (plus my wife went to visit a friend so it was the perfect opportunity to do some hardcore coding!)

The collaborator is my wife, and we discussed the theme “Greatest Fear”. She’s a bit of a hippy, so her greatest fear is environmental change, where loggers, evil corporations and cities have taken over the world and there are no more trees and greenery. We talked about a potential game idea, perhaps a 3D globe where you could save the world by strategically preventing loggers from clearing forests, planting trees and building sustainable energy centres. In the end though, we decided that the idea was turning into some sort of dry economic simulation, and although it was probably educational you have to ask yourself the question: Is this game going to be any fun?

I returned to the idea a few days later and looked at it from a new perspective: gameplay. The environmental theme is still there but the game is much more focused now.

The premise is that there are 2 sides, the Hippies and the Loggers, each fighting to own a piece of land. The Hippies want to plant trees and the Loggers want to cut them down and build cities. Each side gets a selection of units to send out into the field: you have Bulldozers, which are very slow but have immense pushing power, Hippy Vans which are fast and agile but not as powerful, and Hippies & Lumberjacks which are the generic ground troops and are cheap to produce. Units that reach the other side wins some land for your side but you will need to defend it from incoming units as well. The result is a fast paced twitchy game with subtle strategy using a tug of war mechanic. You’re constantly sending out your troops to push the other side back and hopefully get some of your units to the other side as well. I drew heavy inspiration from games such as Plants vs Zombies, and an old PC game called Gearheads. For 2 days solid effort I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out.

You can try the prototype here
http://www.phidinh.com/ludumdare/mini21/

I created all the graphics and programming myself using Photoshop and Flex/Flash. Sound effects were created in sfxr and for the soundtrack I used royalty free music from soundtaxi.net. I got my wife to do a bit of voice acting too! As this is my first Ludum Dare I found the whole process to be a great learning experience. I’ve never written such bad quality code in a long time and yet this is also the first time I’ve managed to complete a game programming project. I think when you really let go of professional development values and ignore things like perfect design patterns and just embrace rapid prototyping, it becomes a whole lot easier to deliver something of a unique value.

Aside from the usual polish and cosmetic details, there are a number of improvements I would like to make should I decide to take this game further. More unit types and more interesting unit behaviours would be good (eg. a police car might scare away hippy activists and make them change direction, or a giant ent might crush bulldozers but also be vulnerable to lumberjacks). The various unit variables need additional tweaking to balance out the gameplay (unit speed and pushing power for example). Finally, some kind of intelligent AI as right now all computer actions are completely random (gasp!)

Hope you enjoy, it’s been an exhausting weekend but I will certainly look forward to the next event!

I’ve just started on something that will take some time to complete, and even probably well into the Mini-LD. Therefore, I’m declaring it as my Mini-LD entry.

The game is about as simple as it gets, and is designed primarily to be something that I can actually finish.

It is a platformer about a fox trying to rescue her beloved soft toy from a gang of dogs. (This is a premise I’ve used on countless unfinished things, I may as well recycle it)

I’ve currently got some sprites of the player, and also a bunch of sprites for terrain.

Here’s a picture of the main character, for those interested:

Isn't she cute?

I’m thinking that I’ll call it a day. Tomorrow, I’ll finish up the terrain sprites and hopefully get some code together.

I’m not hoping that I’ll finish it: I will finish it. No excuses, no whining, and no quitting. I won’t keep flaking out, and I won’t keep hating myself for doing so. There’s no excuse for my flakiness, and it won’t continue.

I made a notification about the collaboration in facebook to get someone to develop the game with. I got a reply from a old classmate of mine and we spent a little while chatting about the basic idea and the roles in the development. This is what we’ve got so far:

The basic theme ideas we came up were deep water and leeches. I built up a experimental prototype of the gameplay.

You’re a diver in a sewer dodging leeches but watch for your stamina meter, if it runs out you’ll drown. You can try to detach the leeches from your body by pressing spacebar, otherwise the leeches will drink your health. The graphics are still placeholders but the basic gameplay is functional. Unfortunately im quite busy with packing my bags and leaving the country soon so i don’t know if ill be able to spend more time on the game much but Nina wanted to take the role of game artist. Oh by the way do you have to work the 48 hours straight or can you work on it as chucks in september?`

- Mika

I’m really embarrassed about this. Maybe more than I should be.

I got side-tracked throughout most of Friday evening and the entirety of Saturday. I’ve lost massive amounts of time. I’ve failed. (I’m sorry if this is coming across as really whiny, I’m trying really hard to keep myself under control and I might be doing such a great job)

I may continue with my game, but I’m not sure right now. I’m really, really pissed at myself and am going to wait until I’ve calmed down more to do anything or make any decisions.

Any game I make at this point will come long after Monday, no doubt.

Sorry, guys…

— Mr. Dude

I’ve thrown out everything I had the other night and decided to restart this afternoon.  Here’s the design so far:

Presumably, we’ll have four colours of gem, I haven’t decided yet.  I have decided that there shall be bullet hell bosses, though.

Yes, I’m aware it’s been done before, I don’t care, I <3 shmups .

Also, if any of you are at SuperHappyDevHouse in Mountain View, California, stop in and say hello! I’m in the Saturn conference room upstairs.

I, like quite a few people, thought that the Mini-LD was this weekend. (It’s not, though)

However, I already had an idea for a game I wanted to make, and I’m still making that game, still making it this weekend.

What I aim to do is start some time today and finish some time Monday evening. (I will use a similar time frame for my Mini-LD game) I will use AS3, and an SVG rendering library I found.

I was going to use pixel sprites, but I… I just don’t like them. I like making vector images, and they’re much more flexible.

My warmup game uses a play off of a tangent from the Mini-LD theme: I’m taking something that is usually scary and making it cute. (Not cutesy fluffy bunny cute, but still cute)

The game is about a demon girl trying to save a jar of cookies from Evil Robots. (Goodness knows what the robots want with the cookies, they might just be trying to start trouble)

The protagonist (Whose name is Luna) has a powered armor suit which is what allows her to fight robots. The game may feature multiple armors, but I’m not sure whether it will.

I’m hoping that this game turns out well. It’d be really nice to finally have a finished project, too. (Up to me entirely, I know, but still worth saying)

Considering i am a man of NO FEAR, i will be making a fishing game

It will contain a morningstar of some description, because morningstars are cool. And a boat!

I’ll think of a proper design when the weekend starts.

I wonder whether the amount of fishing games will be more than the amount of fear-based games?

Yep, I’m a-goin’ for it. However, I’m breaking the rules in two important ways:
1) I’m blithely ignoring the theme and doing double zombie rainbows instead (see my comments in the announce thread for why fear really needs more time to do it justice).
2) instead of 48 hours of calendar time, I’m doing 48 hours of compute time.

I am timelapsing this, and there is a clock visible in the display to accurately assess how long it takes. I’ll be pausing the clock when I’m not at my station (due to shopping, being stuck at my day job, etc).

As usual, I’ll be working in Allegro 4.4, and possibly AllegroGL, with GIMP, Milkshape, MilkyTracker and SFXR rounding out the tool suite.

I have some vague bullet hell ideas, and some kawaii/moe chibi zombie girls bouncing about in my head – should be fun!

Here is a little program I’ve been playing around with (inspired by the theme Evolution, which didn’t make it again):

• Random Art Evolver (Flash)

This program generates random images based on a code (which is shown at the bottom) and mutates them. When you click on one of the images, you’ll see it in full size at the right and all images will start to evolve from that point on. If none of those get any better, you can restart the same code by clicking on the large image.

Once you have found an image you want to use for something, you could capture the screen and save it somewhere as a bitmap, but the idea is to simply save the code and use a function to generate the image at any time.

The library is for haXe, it generates a BitmapData from a given String. It shouldn’t be too hard to port it to as3 as well.

Enjoy!

Now, there obviously isn’t a prize and the whole rating thing is pretty meaningless, but this sorta bothers me. None of the comments fit that kind of rating, and if you have some complaint to merit such a rating, I think voicing them in the comments would be the nice thing to do… (I’m more than willing to take negative feedback, but a universally negative rating tells me nothing useful).

After getting slammed with a couple of troll rating votes (people who rated an entry with 1s across the board, while all other votes had decent ratings), I was curious about how much this was happening overall in the voting.

I ran some numbers, and put a report here: http://spampudding.com/troll.txt

The format is username and how many troll rating lines they received (1 or 2), followed by their average ratings in each category, followed by what their average ratings would have been without the troll votes.

These five entries were hit the hardest, each losing a quarter of a point or more in at least one category due to troll votes: http://spampudding.com/trolltop.txt

Assuming all votes were logged, I’m wondering if maybe the admins could go through the database and see if it was the same couple people making these votes.

The single best indicator of what your overall score will be, is how fun your game is. Innovation, theme, and graphics all are noticeably correlated with the overall score (though a few outliers managed to get a good overall score without meeting the theme). Audio has a slight correlation. Games with good humor tend to have a high overall score, but games with little humor don’t necessarily have a low overall rating.

 
Next I have a few observations on the ranges of values in various categories.

Innovation: Very few games scored below 2 in innovation. It’s clear that innovation is being done.

Theme: Most of the entries made a good attempt at the theme, but a few seemed to ignore it.

Audio: Not many entries scored well in audio, and some put little or no audio in their game. Does this mean participants don’t have very good audio skills, or just that audio was somewhat neglected in the competition?

Humor: Very few games rated above a 3 in humor. Only handful of games both tried to be funny and succeeded.