Well, I don’t have any screenshots to share tonight.  I could make one of the MainMenu, but really – not worth it.  Just take my word.  I do have drop-shadows on some text, which is pretty neat.  But besides that, it is extremely bland, rotten colors and just needs to be touched up during the next phase of the project.

Alpha is all about getting all the features finished and working, and the main menu is working.  Both keyboard (up,down,enter) and mouse (movement, left-click) selection support.  I wasn’t planning on starting the MainMenu and linking up a few other game-states (with no actual implementation yet), until later, but I made a mistake yesterday that I need to be aware of in the future; especially on this project with such limited time.

BlackBird’s Lesson:

I hope you can learn from my simple mistake; Don’t get caught up in things that don’t matter. Yesterday I was working on the editor, I got the track textured – looking a bit better now, and a handful of other little things.  But most of my time 3hrs or so, was spent on a specific tool.  It does have a use, but it also was a waste of time to spend more than 15 to 20 minutes on such a tool.  Yet I added all sorts of little features/behaviors to this tool and I must brag, it came out awesome.  But afterwards I realized that it didn’t do anything to the actual track.  It helps edit the track, but it doesn’t edit the track.

So I didn’t actually make much progress since the tool I added is just a nicety, and not a requirement.  I decided to take a step back from the editor tonight and start working on the gamestates for a change of pace.  I know a lot of you LD’ers are shooting for Oct 31st to release by, but I won’t be releasing until early to mid December at the absolute earliest.  Although, I will be completing Alpha by October 31st.  Any features not completed by that date, will effectively be cut from the project.

I expect it to take the full month of November to polish up the features, and reduce the bug count as much as possible before releasing.  This process will likely go into December, however after October 31st I can not, and will not, add any new features.  I promise I won’t.  (Hmm, will I?)

I think I may have got a name now! I’m thinking of calling it space waves.

Today I’ve fixed the accelerometer so that tilting the device now works, and I’ve also been able to get my iPad to run the app. My friend gave me the login and I spent like 2 hours tying to set it up, still better than him though! ha.

The next thing I need to do is make the enemy spawn thingy work, which is the main part of this project. The game is turning out to be relatively simple to make, which is good for the time I have left.

Oh and also I have a screen shot now! Shows how far I am though the project very well.

-bear

This was my first entry into a Ludum dare and I’ve got to say I had a blast, and most of all I learned a lot.

It started with a Friday afternoon pixel sketch of a guy on a BMX. And with that I went full steam ahead and created a game with a wry sense of humour. The game has generally been panned as not being fun, and I have to agree. It’s hard to take creative criticism seriously, even harder when it comes from 4chan, but the fans will be your harshest critics, so you should listen when they speak.

Hit the jump for the specifics and nitty gritty of the game.

(more…)

Hello People.

I’m jayden, 14 years of age, and want to start getting into making small little video games, and thought these challenges would be a good place to start. I was planning on making a 3D FPS in Blender, using it as the main 3D tool, and as the Game Engine, but I thought that was kidna cheating. i am looking at using Unreal Engine, and am looking into the legalities and licenses of that. I am not sure if I should od a simple flash game, or something like that. iw ant it to be simple, but not too hard.

A small step forward.  Worked on getting the win condition to trigger.

Stacker Progress Screenshot 10/6

The trigger is firing, but I need to animated the target zone and the fact that you’ve hit it.  The text looks awful too.

I also got some business hat things done as well: signed up for Intel’s AppUp Developer whosywhatisit, Google Checkout thingy and a couple offical business forms with my county.  Can you believe you have to file for a permit to do work in your own home!?!  What is America coming too?  Anyways… tired… must sleep.

Total Hours To Date: 13.75

A Greedy Profession was made for MiniLD 20, and I started working on it again just before October. So, why not work on it for this next challenge?

A lot has changed since its original submission. Major new features include a tutorial, sounds, better controls, and high scores. All I think it lacks is music. (If I were to make the game again, I would probably take a whole different path on making the single-player fun. I just don’t have time to do this in this month.)

More after the break….
(more…)

After a few days of other work (Smiles for Windows Phone 7), and making un-interactive interactive movies with silly internet tools, I have finally resumed working on my October game.

For the next while I wont be using perspective, even though it looks fancier.

Map is getting dizzy

What you couldn’t see before was the room size was actually 32×32 (most of that was cut off). I like squares, but in practice, screens aren’t square. So the new room size is now 32×24, or in other words 4:3. That’s sounds like a weird choice given we’re all about HDTV 16:9 these days, but I actually don’t intend to show the entire room at once on screen (except when zoomed). I want some scrolling per room, but not much. I haven’t decided the optimal zoom yet, but it will depend on the target system.

Anyways, though I haven’t done much work yet, I need to head out to the grocery story while there’s still light. More progress to come! (Hopefully!)

Going for the October Challenge with a Million Dollar game, just need the one sale an I could win! ;o)

Still Haven’t got a name yet for my game. I’l work on that later.

Today I’ve been working on getting the enemy spawn thingy to work. I should have it done soon, I hope…..

The game isn’t in a playable version yet but my goal is to have one by the end of the weekend, so thats fine. Been tying to get my friend to give me the login details for the iPhone dev centre so I can test the app on my iPad, He wants to see a playable version first…. I don’t think he’s realised I need to test my app every 3 seconds(I’m not joking).

I’m wondering how long it’ll take apple to approve the game,  if I knew It would give me a better idea to get the game done. I’ve heard it can take anything from two days, to three weeks.

-bear

I’ve made some serious progress tonight.

I’ve gotten the basics now working in Unity:

• Yellow Blocks
• Physics and stacking
• Mouse position determines place of new block

I like the 3D-ness the block have now, even though the gamer is interacting purely in a 2D fashion.

Total hours so far: 11.5  This probably means that I’m already ahead of the LD12 pace.

Well progress has been coming since I last posted the Splash screen.  I have been working on some tools, in particular the track editor.  I remain vague about my game idea for the current time, but it will be a racing game; for all intent and purposes.  I am focusing efforts on being unique, and a thorough google search only brought up 2 other “personal” projects/attempts at what I am doing.  I am hoping that serves to my advantage, but I am happy to know I have an idea that is more original than just making an Pac-Man clone with different theme.

So about this track editor; I spent my day Sunday working on starting it, and Monday night after work I lost about 3 hours of productivity.  I was beat, muscles aching, etc… and couldn’t concentrate.  However I did manage to get a few productive hours and managed more than I expected for the night.  Undo/Redo capabilities for all current actions:  Add/Delete TrackNodes as well as the ability to Move/Edit the node.  This editor is within the game*, however it will likely be stripped from the release build.

An editor under development for my Sell-a-Game Challenge.

I have been wondering quite a bit whether or not I should implement undo/redo.  I estimate it will take 3x or so longer to maintain the actions, but I also believe it will save time when designing/developing more tracks.  I plan on a minimum of 5 tracks, but hope for more than that.

Tonight I’ve started by writing this post, soon I will begin working on building the actual track from the nodes above.  I am hoping that doesn’t take me all night.  I want to do more than just that, but at this time I have nothing else planned, as I can’t think what comes next.

*Although it is within game, I have an EditorFramework that acts as an external editor; giving me advantages of a professional looking interface, menus and more.

A few hours later. . .

Well, I did manage to get somewhere tonight.  Even further than just getting the track surface built from the nodes.  Although, I didn’t get the track textured, yet, I did manage to build it quickly.  Also I sent it off to a partner of mine, and fixed several small editor ‘issues’.  Added saving/loading of editor settings for convenience , undo/redo still fully working.  (Redo for the move action was previously broke!)  Here is a small image of the track being built from the nodes:

A track being built from the nodes!

Here are some screenshots of my October Challenge Entry: Explosive Love:

Start Screen

I’m accepting PoV’s October Challenge: Make a game, sell 1 copy. I’m going to extend and polish Stacker, my Ludum Dare 12 entry. It is the most complete game and best of all my Ludum Dare entries. I also have some ideas about how to make it more interesting than the current scheme of moving the goal line higher and higher each level.

Serendipitously, Unity 3.0 was released last week. I’ve been eyeing using it in future projects for a few weeks now, and have actually done several tutorials and watched a bunch of videos online. I was particularly impressed with the Visual Studio integration. If I had known about that earlier, I would have tried it much sooner. In the past, engines, frameworks and languages have caused me much gnashing of my teeth because their IDE was so painful.

Stacker in action

It’s time we unveil our game! This is the first concept actually created by both me and Smiley over at Area 161. (Technically, there was Tiny the Blog but that was just me at the 360|iDev game jam sans Smiley) Our code name for the game is (drumroll please):

DARTS

Yeah, I understand codenames are supposed to be…well, codes. However, we’re still new to game dev and so we’re saving all of our creativity for the game itself and perhaps the real game name. Remember, I’m also the one that said it was safe to discuss your ideas publicly, so that’s what we’re doing. Now, I know what your thinking, “Darts? Really? All this talk about story, originality, ground breaking interaction, etc and they come up with darts?”

Some key factors to the game design:

1. Multiple devices – Our darts are going to use iPods and iPhones as the dart device with the iPad being the dartboard. It’s something that seems to make sense for us and still unique. We actually had the idea around WWDC, but have been waiting for GameCenter to make it to the iPad which finally is happening with iOS 4.2. It’s not a new idea or even all that novel, but it’s still unique enough to be different.

2. Dart types – This is where we will differentiate ourselves. There’s a ton of serious dart games out there for both the iPad and iPod. Ours is NOT going to be joining their ranks. Ours is going to be completely different. While we are taking the basic game of darts as the basis for our mechanic, that’s about where it stops. See, it’s not that we think that darts as a game isn’t fun. However, let’s face the truth. Darts is not world’s most favorite past time. Therefore, we have an idea of how to introduce some more fun into the game. To give you an idea, here’s some concept art for the darts:

A couple of dart types

That is what you’ll see on the dart device whereas this is an idea of what you might see once the dart lands on the dart board:

Concept Landed Dart

We have some other creative ideas as well, but we haven’t fleshed them out yet. Therefore, you’ll have to tune in to our next week’s post to get a deeper view into the game.

The main artist for the game art is my dad. Smiley and I are way rusty on our art skills, so we needed someone who actually knew what they were doing. My dad has been an artist all his life, most of it professionally as a graphic artist. He’s retired now, so he needs something to keep him busy. According to him, the sketches above show how “rusty” he is. His “rusty” beats our best efforts, hands down. LOL It’s also neat to have him contribute to the design of the game in addition to being “just” the artist. How can you not look at that concept art and get inspired?

Technical Update:

The past week was getting a rough game engine in place to put up screens, load/play sounds and figure out simple sprites. We coulda used Cocos-2D, but I figured that we’re going to eventually be pushing the boundaries of iOS as far as interaction, etc in future games. Therefore, rolling our own will likley be an eventual thing, so we better get our learn on now. This week is going to be nailing down the throw mechanic. I have some ideas of how to do it technically in my head, but we’ll see if I can actually translate that into compilable Objective-C code!

All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time for us as a company. We’re in the throes of building our first game and we have a crazy deadline to hit. We’re starting to feel like real game developers for the very first time and we’ll be honest, the feeling is pretty intoxicating.

Last Ludum Dare 48 Hour Compo I failed to make enough progress by Saturday afternoon and I retreated. The next day I decided that I would take a look into the game engine Unity that I know a few people in #ludumdare use. It looked pretty neat so I decided that I would use my “Enemies as Weapons” idea as a test game to learn the Unity editor and play around with the scripting.  A month later, not a whole lot of progress was made, but I did end up getting a little used to Unity and it isn’t completely overwhelming anymore. Last weekend I upgraded to 3. 0, took a look at MonoDevelop and liked what I saw. I am in the process of migrating my JavaScript code over to C#, which may be a smidgen more difficult to deal with than JavaScript in some ways but is much more powerful.

The Game

The working title is LoneStranger’s UFO Defense (How original! It will look nice next to LoneStranger’s Caverns, LoneStranger’s Shredder, LoneStranger’s Islands…. and should also not to be confused with XCOM: UFO Defense). It’s a side view, single screen game where you have to defend your people from the invading alien invasion force. Along the way you will use captured and scavenged alien technology to build up better weapons and defenses. I have a little dude that runs back and forth along the bottom, and a random-moving UFO in the sky. The player can shoot non-lethal bullets at the moment.

An early shot of the UFO Defense game.

I’m currently putting together the full gameplay docs, and along with that, the desired feature list. I will then split the list into “must have” and “would be nice” and “maybe sometime in the future” categories. Furthermore, the features in the “must have” category will be ranked based on an implementation order that makes sense. Anything on the “must have” list should be in before the end of the month, and I should really have most of those implemented before working on the “would be nice” list. The lists will be the topic of a future post.

Platform

My target platform is the web using the Unity web player. I know it’s not as widespread as Flash, but it’s what I’m using and that’s what I’m stuck with.

As far as my revenue making strategy, I don’t think I want to bother with any official sites, though that may change. My current plan is to host it on my own website and throw some ads on the page. I am already signed up with Google AdSense, and that is probably what I’ll use unless I do a little research and find something else that pays better. Advertising the game itself might be a challenge and will have to be word of mouth initially. As with some other PoV Challengers, I feel the goal of October is to make the game, not necessarily make the target profit.

Challenges

TV in general is a big time suck. My wife and I recently signed up for Netflix and added a lot of movies to our queue. I’ll probably be drawn to about one or two movies a week, but if I’m disciplined enough on non-movie days, I should be ok. Pandora and my headphones are a great way to focus energy toward the project. Other web things I usually peruse each day might be another timesuck, but again, discipline will be key.

Artwork isn’t a strong point of mine, but I do have a couple friends that draw. They have both told me in the past they won’t hesitate to do things for any games I make. The plan here would be to finalize all artwork sometime in the next week or so and ship them off my sketches and requirements so I can get it all back before the deadline.

Music shouldn’t be a challenge in it’s most simple form, since Wolfram Alpha can make some really fitting backround tunes. However, I would like to take this a step further. More on this in a future post.

The Future

Of course, I should keep at least one blurry eye on the future and make sure that I’m designing something that could be easily ported to another platform. I’d love to do a iOS game if I felt that this was taking off (and it paid for the Unity add-on itself). Things like control scheme and display would have to take this into account.

And….GO!

I already started, but now that I’ve made my first post it really feels like a compo… only longer and with a better goal!

I had a bit of a slow start over the first weekend, but made up for it somewhat yesterday and this morning, so I’m in for the October challenge after all!

I’m making a trading / crew management game which I’m calling Airship Traders. It’s set in your standard fantasy world, except in this world wizards are a dime a dozen, so being a wizard doesn’t really make you very special – you have to go the extra mile, like becoming a rich and famous Airship Trader for example!

Having learnt from LD18 that I’m not very good at art / graphics I’m scaling back graphical ambitions way back this time round – going to go for a fairly simple 8-bit look similar to that of Chaos: Battle of Wizards. This game will include a bunch of personal firsts, including:

1. Non-trivial mouse based interface (Working)
2. Map larger than the screen (Working – with a functional mini-map)
3. Mix of random-generated and file-based content (TODO )

I’m developing in Java with Slick2D and here’s my first screenshot (just colored boxes for now, graphics will be added once the gameplay is working):

Towns, trade goods, large map with mini-map and mouse controls - all working

In terms of trying to sell my game, I’m not even going to bother with app-stores (they all seem to require that I learn a new set of development tools or APIs, which is a bad idea considering the complexity of my game PLUS I’m in South Africa, which isn’t supported by Google App Store and probably some others – I didn’t even bother to check the rest).

My plan for selling a copy is to have a free-to-play 15 minute demo downloaded from my website (with ads), with a PayPal payment required to buy the full game that doesn’t have a time limit (I think this is similar to what BigFishGames does). This will entail making some improvements to my website, so my deadline for finishing the game is 23 October, so that I can dedicate the last week to building the sales infrastructure. If that looks like its not going to happen before the deadline, I’ll probably go to one of the handful of Java games portals with ad-revenue sharing and just try to drive traffic there from my website.

Good luck to everyone participating! I’m already having tons of fun, hope you all do too!

I’ve started work on my entry for the October challenge. Its a simple arcade like shooter with a couple of enemies. The main feature of the game is that it changes the amount of enemies depending on how well the player is doing, each wave. Providing that new game feeling for a lot longer.

I’m making this game for the iPhone/iPod Touch, with openFrameworks.

I dont have a working version of the game yet, so there is no pictures but I should have some by the end of the week.

Submissions are closed (and you can’t say I didn’t give you enough time!). mad props to all who entered

> you can check out all the games by clicking this sentence here <

we had a total of 9 games made, some of them by first-time LDers, and from what I’ve played so far they are all looking pretty good too, make sure to check them out!

so, now that’s out of the way we can all get on with this october challenge business!

I’m blogging about my progress daily at my blog. My goal is to submit this game to the iPad app store by the end of October. Here’s 3 screenshots to show you the progression:

First couple days – got basic 3D rendering working:

The next few I fancied it up with lighting and textures:

Then I wrapped it up by refactoring a bit of code and building a level editor around it:

This week: Gameplay and possibly running it on the iPad.

If you want daily updates, either check my blog, or follow on the Planet Ludum Dare aggregator

It’s really cool seeing how many games are coming together for this. As a reminder, if anyone has a game that’s relatively working and cool, you might want to submit it to the IGF ($95 entry fee). We all have about two weeks, so that’s quite a bit of time to get something cool together! Even if you don’t win, a ton of indie game gurus evaluate your game and give you some sharp feedback

Cheers!
-Phil

Since I finished my LD18 entry: Robots <3 Monster I’ve been working on an Iphone version of the game. I’m getting close to finishing the game and I’ll try to do a few blogposts about the process.

The name has been changed to Explosive Love and here’s the menu screen:

Explosive Love Menu Mockup

I’ll try to post some screenshots later today.