Couldn’t be botered adding in music, too braindead.

This was a rather disappointing first attempt. I was unable to coax the copy compiled under XCode to run outside of the Debug mode of the IDE. I also tried to set up Code::Blocks to compile the project, but it just plain failed altogether, and now I’m out of time, so I guess that’s that. It would be awesomely amazing if someone managed to get a copy compiled on Windows for me, but I don’t have very high hopes of that happening… live and learn. =)

This was quite a learning experience though. I had no prior experience using SFML. Using it for the competition was probably a mistake, but I’d been wanting to try it out for a while, so at least it forced me to finally get around to it. Next time I’ll get some prior experience, rather than diving in head first. Then there was the time. I know its been said many times, but… I really underestimated the amount of time it would take to both learn to use SFML, and make a game with it.

Finally, I’m rather proud of my art. Its still kind of crappy, but its less crappy than the usual stick figures and grass that I draw, so go me! I discovered character drawing style (from another) that I am actually capable of emulating (ie: it suits my limited artistic ability). Now its time to get a bunch of sleep and move on to other projects. And maybe watch that total lunar eclipse tomorrow night.

Update! I finally figured out why the stand-alone Mac app was not working. Next I’ll see if I can get Code::Blocks set up to compile a Windows version. If I can then I’ll see about working on a version for the Jam with a bunch of bug fixes.

Well that was fun. Game is buggy as a buggy bug bug bug no imagination left. Need to go away for a while and not think about Ludum Dare for a few hours. Forgot about memory management so everything is just dumped into RAM, which is fine if you dont mind my crappy game using over a GB of your memory .

I recorded a timelapse video which I’ll upload sometime soon.

Well done everyone

I submitted my entry well before the deadline ended, something I never thought I would manage. I’m usually the one desperately trying to code the last gameplay elements 10 minutes before the submission deadline.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my first LD went. I set out to actually finish the game instead of getting bogged down with coding complex game mechanics or doing lots of art for the game as I always do. I think I actually succeeded with that goal even though the game has some rough parts, such as a complete lack of music, sound effects and graphics.

Even though the game is a bit short, all the gameplay elements are there, there’s a menu and I even had time to add some animations. Considering the game was made in ~20 hours, it isn’t that bad at all.

Here’s the timelapse I recorded if anyone’s interested. I’m sorry there’s no music, the laptop I’ve been using isn’t really capable of editing video.

For the next LD I’ll hopefully come more prepared.

I am so happy to announce that my first Ludum Dare entry is finished.

Volatile is an experimental RTS. Discover the map for production bonuses, construct Mines, Towers and Missile Pods, and blast the AI away!

I didn’t get to add everything I wanted, or polish it perfectly, but I’m happy with the state it ended up in.

I will be working on the game more soon, to properly finish it.

Play Volatile here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2063

Thanks for the challenge! I’ll stick around and play some other entries too. All feedback appreciated!

-Tv

Well, I’ve finished my first LD Compo. It was pretty grueling, fun, and ultimately I did get something finished. If I’d had the idea earlier, it might even have been something fun. My original, now abandoned project, will be picked up again tomorrow and will be something I’ll work on over the next few weeks. Hopefully it will turn into something fun.

In the meantime, I hope that if you try “Great Discoveries in Human History” you’ll find something amusing in it. I’ve been blown away by everyone’s entries and I can’t wait to try them all! Here’s my last screenshot…

GDHH is a memory/matching game with a tongue-in-cheek view of history

You click on a tile to reveal it. Click on a second tile to see if they match. If so, you score a point and the tiles are removed. The extra trick here is that you have to match the discovery or invention with its benefit to humanity (or the problem it solves). These are from a decidedly modern American’s perspective. It’s built in some fairly vanilla Javascript with help from a server-side PHP script. Oh and jQuery/jQuery-UI. This may be the ugliest code I’ve spit out, but it’s done! Also I had no time after coming up with all the discoveries to work on art, so y0u get black and white. FYI, there’s 71 pairs of discoveries and benefits in all.

Good luck to everyone!

At last, I managed to complete the game & fix all the remaining bugs…
Play it here : entry

The engine took me one day to code from scratch (no flixel, nor punk). If i had more time, I would add a music track & allow level editing Maybe later !

I really enjoyed this weekend ! We were 5 people participating here, at Motion Twin (Bordeaux, France) : Whitetigle, Bumdum, Vallandre, Hane and me !

I will be there for LD20, for sure

Comments are welcome !

Ahh it’s over. Just waiting for dropbox to speed up… It’s taking ages to upload such a small game.

It’s been exhausting but it’s at a stage where it’s playable at least. I just called it ‘The Genetic Playground”. Just a simple splicing game. More of a toy but i had bigger ideas for this game. Maybe for the Jam i’ll add some more features and keep adding to it if i have time in the future.

I’ve been keeping Ludum Dare progress updated on this blog: http://kyliroth.wordpress.com/

so that’s why i’ve been quiet on here but i’ve enjoyed reading many people’s posts during the past 2 days when i’ve had time to peek at them.

I’ll enjoy playing the games too but there’s so many of them! I really enjoyed this Ludum Dare competition! I’ll take part again and i’ll learn from this definitly!

#edit: Here’s  the link to my entry. And a cheeky screen shot…

The entrance to the genetic lab...

Cheers,

Kyle.

Jeeesus. Five minutes to go, and my game is zipped up and submitted. Grab it here. Feels strange and amazing to be ‘done’ with something – I’ve tinkered around with games for months without getting to a point I’m happy with. And while there are a few items not grayed out on my Scanno to do list, I did much more than I ever thought I could in two days. And I actually have fun playing the result.

Rather embarrassed about Gunpoint now. It could probably be done in a week.

The finished game is pretty much what I planned: a top-down shooter with randomised enemies, whose randomised bits you can steal for yourself. I didn’t end up scaling much dynamically, except the gun sizes. I couldn’t find a way to make it look right in the time, so it was quicker – even for me – to draw a few engine and weapon types. The differences are more immediately interesting, too – “Ooh, blue plasma?”

Number one thing that went right was definitely time management. I had two days, so I picked something I thought I might just about be able to do in one. It was done in one and a half, so I had that crucial half day to take a working concept, find the fun, and make the game about that.

I don’t know if I actually made it fun, but it’s so much closer than it would have been if I’d picked a more ambitious idea and only just got the basics hammered out. This is my first finished game, and given the time limit I thought I’d end up with something a lot more half-baked.

It is buggy, and its tutorial is just gibberish, but in an ideal circumstance it’s conceivable that it could convey to you what you need to know. Oh, except that you have to press R to restart.

Thing that went least well was trouble shooting. I’m rarely good at this, but on the scanning ray in particular I just went out of my mind. It’s still buggy – won’t always scan everything there is to scan on your first scan – and I may have messed up other things in the last minute fixes.

I said I was going to leave graphics till last, but in the end I decided it was worth a stab at them if I gave myself a hard time limit. I basically managed to turn the visuals from offensively ugly to merely very crude. I’m OK with crude. There’s just a particular look to very bad graphics that’s not endearing or ignorable or in any way OK, and I had to try to avoid that.

I also took time to put in sounds for almost everything important, and I’m really glad I did. I knew they’d be important to the feel, but I didn’t quite appreciate how important the feel would be to the overall thing. It’s not an art game, it’s not very brave or inventive, so it really needs to have some decent ‘pew pew!’s in.

I have exactly no time tomorrow to polish this up and also submit it to the jam, the less strict contest that gives an extra day. Which is a shame, because it needs a few bandages to hold it together properly, and a few basic human rights like a choice of resolutions. I will do those things, just not right away. For now, I am done. Thanks for reading.

So I ended up trying for something too large to complete in a sleep deprived final 10 hours.  About an hour and a half before the end, I decided to go by the old mantra “Time running low .’. branch the project and add spiders”.  A frantic hour followed, accompanied by a great boss music medley from nicovideo, and I got something submitted, albeit without any win condition/loose condition/much point.  But dayum, it freaks me out some it does.

Submission page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1190

It at least shows what I was going for with the shadow system, and how it performs under pressure.

Also, for fun and to make the timelapse more interesting, I had a big image in GraphicsGale I was adding to a bit to show some of my thoughts and add a little commentary.  That’s after the jump if anyone is interested (and can see this post through the deluge of submission posts ).  I think this kind of thing would have been a bit more use if I had a drawing tablet with me, instead of just mousing.

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So, I finished my entry, ROBOTS AMONG US. I think I spent some 12hrs or so on it. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to play it, and the game mechanics are kind of experimental, so we’ll see how that goes. I fear that it’s kind of dull, and impossible, and confusing. Let me know!

Robots Among Us - Progress GIF anim

The goal of the game is to navigate the crowds and avoid the evil robotic infiltrators. You can use the goggles to spot them (RMB). Move towards the CLUE which reveals the CLOAKING GENERATOR used by the robots. You need to blow that up with the C4. If you have time, you can pick up a one-time-use GUN, or pick up a DAMSEL.

Holding LMB will make you run, but doing so slowly increases your detection radius because you look suspicious. The goggles drain your health a little if you leave them on. On top of this, wearing them makes you stand out, and taking them on and off a lot looks suspicious too.

I wanted to do some painted arcade style borders and a title screen, but did not have the time (spent the last minutes on sounds). The sloppy source code is included in the zip. It was written in BlitzMax. I can compile a Mac version too if there’s any interest.

The game can be found here:
Robots Among Us

Here Be Monsters!

Civilization I sailing meets R-Type I side-shooting.  Sound fun?

Play it in your browser.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3040

And after 48h, it’s somewhat done… Well, it’s playable, and has multiplayer and scoring, so I guess I can’t complain too much!

You can see the entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?uid=2968

This is the workspace from my company where Deepnight, Valandre, WhiteTigle and I participated to DL19 !

my place

Well I’m not submitting it because it’s nowhere near finished. I will submit a Jam version but probably won’t have much time to work on it.

It’s pretty broken but it’s got potential. Right now it’s kind of like a SFXR for terrains .. all of these were generated completely at random with no user input beyond a planet name that is used as a random seed.

Here’s some pretty planets:

So, my game is now submitted. You can play it here (flash): PLAY!

Here’s the entry page: ENTRY

Time to rest.

I went full retro this time, I love that style of gfx.

4 different ambient “songs” made with renoise to set the mood.

An end with a twist, which I hope will make ppl remember it.

Should take about 5-15 minutes to finish.

Play it @ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1087

Made with Ruby & http://ippa.se/chingu

This was my first LD and my only post for the competition. It was too difficult for me to focus on the game and writing post in english… -_-

It was a very intense experience. Saturday was a lot of fun, Sunday was Hell, the last 15 minutes was above Hell. I could have killed anyone who would have stand between me and my keyboard…

I kept a log of my activity on Land Of Fodnal during the 48h :

3:00 –>  Discovery ( Containment is second :-/ ) –>THINK
4:00 –> go for minesweeper game with island progresive discovery –>THINK
5:00 –> ??? Inside the body cells discovery <vs> fantasy
7:00  –> go to bed
10:00 –> wake-up >>Brainstorming
11:00 –> have the CASTLE MANAGEMENT idea -> start to code + base GFX
14:00 –> lunch break
14:15 –> folks structure tracking
14:45 –> Danger zone + tower ( number in zone are killing my display :-/ )
16:30 –> structure selection + scroll
18:00 –> structure interface GFX + ergonomics
18:36 –> loosing huge ammount of times on interface ( have no field / buttons / whatever libs )
19:35 –> still crawling with buttons… -_-zZ
20:23 –> At least I can build things !! It seems fun to discover map buy building things to scroll.
21:00 –> lunch break
21:30 –> try too animate folks
22:00 –> Refactoring
23:20 –> GameOver sequence
00:00 –> Decide to cycle worldmap… Always late for this kind of decisions…
00:20 –> working on sight system
00:40 –> Debugging cycled coord
01:00 –> Trying Musagi
02:44 –> Sound session end –>  debug
04:00(?) –> Go to Bed
11:00 –> Wake Up
11:30 –> Work on Aborigines path
12:00 –> FX ans parts
13:00 –> new bads
13:10 –> try to make nice border for beach but fail -> goto difficulty generation
14:30 –> working on sight system visibility ( = headash )
15:15 –> Starting the science bonus system
19:15 –> Editing world map
19:30 –> adding some hints
20:15 –> correctings few bugs
20:40 –> starting minimap o_O
21:20 –> Intro artwork + intro coding
22:00 –> Title artwork
23:00 –> First serious test on the game…
23:15 –> implements new sciences
00:00 –> adding small elements
01:00 –> balancing ( ouch, a bit late for this )
01:20 –> adding difficulty level
02:30 –> adding hiscore local saving
02:45 –> Arrrrgh my first infinite loop NOW !!!
03:10 –> Version submited !

Now I will test the other games !

Ok I’m done and I’m completely shattered after staying up all last night and working like crazy right up until the submission time.

My game is called Island Commander and it can be downloaded from here. The game is kind-of inspired by Carrier Command but with a completely different combat system. I wanted to have a story driven game so I put a bunch of cutscenes in there but they are short because I didn’t have much time to work on them (I did most of them in the last hour).

Currently it requires Windows Vista or 7, but I’ll probably do a Linux port and make it work for XP as well.

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As expected this participation didnt reach the end with an complete game, but at least I moved forward in some research was able to create some nice pieces that I believe I will use soon or later :

- store the user location and movement direction in a server
- make the server based on tomcat
- remove the inactive users from the list of current users
- make unity to send the current position and movement direction of an character
- receive on unity the result of http calls using POST

now my next steps will be :
- beased on the list of objects from the server, keep track of the necessary objects to create and show.

good luck all !
cheers