My game is done! I’d tell you all about it, but I already did that over at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=1548

Well, I have to say that was fun as hell, coding a game and chilling on IRC? Hell yea! Well anyways my game is Dodge and Collect! Which was originally suppose to be a top down space shooter with a planet map, you would go around collect artifacts and discovering cool things I had to cut most of it out because I ran out of time.. It barely fits the theme now .-. Well what can I say? I’ll be working on it more in the future, but tomorrow I’m sleeping in and going Christmas shopping then I better start on my homework… Don’t want to leave that for long. Well here is what I learned.

Things to do again:

Ask questions, something I did a lot.

Another Dare, I will certainly be back when the next dare roles around

Hard Core work in the last 3 hours.

Most Importantly, have fun!

Things not to do again:

Not to waste so much time on IRC, only talk when you need help or have give assistance.

Not start with a new language, which wont be a problem next time around, will hopefully be broken into FlashPunk.

Take time doing real life things, I spent way to long away from the keyboard, will have to try and Minimize that next time!

But yea! Check out my game here click on it, then press P to play

As so many LD19ers have already expressed, this has been a busy weekend to squeeze a game jam into; amidst a family holiday party, a day long wedding, and long standing plans to see the new Tron movie.  None the less, I was determined to participate.  I was also initially turned off by the theme, but am now happy with the direction that a  little google-enhanced brainstorming led me.

“Cannot Ludum Dare 19″ is inspired by Lyn Yutang’s quote, “Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.”  It’s a puzzle game that involves collecting gems to open doors and navigate a maze.  The catch is that different door-opening gems rob the player of specific abilities.  With all of this competition’s delays and drop-outs (including this game’s), this theme-interpretation seems particularily relevent.

All nine gem-types have been implemented and tested, but the test-maze leaves much to be desired in terms of level design.  I’m about a third of the way through redesigning this maze, and look forward to submitting the completed game tomorrow.  I’d like to have submitted for the contest, but am happy to just participate.  Hopefully I’ll be able to dedicate more time to the next compo. 

Cheers to all of the participants!!!  It’s been fun watching everyone’s updates, and I look forward to playing through so many of the submissions.

So, here’s a screenshot or two:

Next, I didn’t blog as much becuase last time I was slightly distracted by blogging instead of just developing. So, up next will most likely be my meal montage for your enjoyment. Followed by a comprehensive list of how to fail at ludum dare, or my jam entry. Add another failure to the ever growing list. The problem? No way of scoring. Hopefully I can get that fixed.

A very good question...

To bed, that’s where!

I didn’t get everything finished that I would have liked to. There’s room for a lot more upgrades, combat (though it works nice peacefully), multiple endings (only one for now) and nicer art, like backgrounds.

Still, I’m both excited and content with the final product. The last few hours meant quite a bit of panic for me, since I did not have the concentration to space to include really everything I would have liked. I’m looking forward to playing the oodles of great games that have been released and am hoping for somewhat decent votes myself. Though participating in itself was awesome in it’s own right!

Post-mortem and Timelapse will follow during the next days.

I need sleep.

Badly.

Play it here or grab the source.

Corpse Runner, a (very) simple maze game is finished enough for the competition entry. Made today after scrapping my initial project, it’s just a maze game with a single twist. Your goal is to find the exit to your maze within the time limit. However your time limit very very short (just 15 seconds). Plus the maze is very dark and you can only see your immediate surroundings.

The twist is that at any point you “sacrifice” yourself for the next maze-goer. The next person will be able to “use” your corpse to extend his time limit and each corpse leaves behind a small amount of light.

I started this game this afternoon after scrapping my previous idea which had a neat mechanic that just wasn’t feasible within the time limit. The maze was going to be a bit more full-featured, with keys that needed to be found and multiple doors to unlock before escaping. However the game is so simple that adding any more tedious mechanics just made it even less fun.

I like the mechanic of dropping corpses and using them in future player runs even if the execution here is pretty limited. I might take some time and investigate it a little further in the future with a different game.

Anyway Ludum Dare as usual was stressful, frustrating, and yet simultaneously a blast as usual. Best of luck to everyone else and I look forward to seeing what gems other people have made.

I have finished writing up the entry for my game and getting the binaries and sources on my public site. If you’re interested, have a look at Q-Bers. It is a puzzle game in which you must manipulate the grid of cubes to reveal a specific picture given a single clue about what is in the picture.

Hi, I’m having trouble compiling an application using SFML. When I run the app with “Debug” selected as the active configuration, it runs fine. However, when I select “Release” as the active configuration the screen flashes white for an instant, then it dies. Help?

Observatory has been submitted!

Windows (tested) and Mac (fingers crossed!) builds available.

I would like to make a web version available, but I’m not yet sure how to host the Unity web player…

There’s no turning back now, my entry has been submitted! As expected, I spent the last few hours frantically fixing bugs that were suddenly noticed when I built the damn game and ran it outside of Unity… silly game!

I would’ve loved to submit a web player version as well, but I never got around to writing a script to ensure that you picked fullscreen… but hey, both PC and OSX support… that’s something… and now, I’ve been waiting 48 hours to try out all these awesome games! Seeya when my fingers turn numb! (But then, how would I chat? Meh!)

Anyhoo, if you wanna check out my game, I’d better shove in a link for the lazy!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?uid=3042

Thanks for an awesome compo, I’ll definitely be back! ^_^

After 48 hours, Scarab Amazing has been designed, developed, bug-fixed and released on multiple platforms!

It was the first time I participated in Ludum Dare, and it was amazing.

Although it’s 3 AM again (just like it started), I’m too curious about the other entries, so I’ll check out some of them before going to bed. Tomorrow I’ll spend some more time on this.

Next post… the time-lapse movie!

–Day 2 morning update:

Over half way through. Pretty much nothing other than the core engine is done, which includes collision stuff, movement & physics, animation stuff, and moving seamlessly between maps.

I know I can finish the engine stuff in time it’s just all the assets, I’ll be able to do an enemy or two and a few rooms, if I go into jam time then I may be able to enlist the help of a friend.

–Day 2 end:

In the morning I started working on getting other entities into the game. After that I started working on giving those entities AI, at first they started going of, some disappearing off-screen forever and some loading new maps because I initially just gave them the same code as the player. Fixed the problems and then actually used them to helped me fix a few collision bugs. I wondered how many of them I could have on a map so I tried a hundred, fine, 200, 400, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 all worked fine. (testing this stuff is known as messing around/wasting time)

But their movement was stupid, so I spent a while too long improving the AI, stopped them going near map edges/terrain and smoothing the movement to make them not completely change direction (i.e not go right if they were previously going left etc.). I then added a couple of behaviour types as well as the random motion, I made one type scared of the player and made them flee when close, I then added another type that made them swarm towards the player if they got close enough and the effect was great, I thought they would immediately home onto the player and lock into position but due to the movement smoothing code they circle the player with a very small loop and can be shaken off. I then added a few other fish types (for 5 fish in total) and added a method to just say load x number of this entity and y of this entity instead of writing (or copy pasting) 100 lines of code and sprawled them randomly around the map.

After that I realized I had wasted my time writing a fish simulator and couldn’t finish in time. Though I thought I might be able to complete it in jam time IF I could get my friend to help.

–Day three

Jam time had begin and I was relying on my friends amazing art skills, but due to other circumstances my friend could only make one map… So while the game features were almost complete there would be no content, so I gave up.

–Hindsight

In hindsight I know why I failed, I made a stupid decision to have fully hand drawn maps which led to me spending too long on the core engine. I then spent too long on making the AI… of the fish… which were merely supposed to be used to make it more aesthetically pleasing/immersive.

The problem with the engine is that all the maps were full images and thus the collision stuff was slightly more complex. Absolutely no idea what compelled me to use hand drawn maps I’m not exactly an amazing artist so making a good map would take up way too much time, though somehow I thought it would be easier to draw a map all in one.

Next LD I shall stick to good old fashioned tilesets for the map, that will reduce programming time costs and asset creation time costs, and remove almost all the problems I had with this LD. I knew that this was going to be my doom about half way through but it was too late to remove all my progress and begin a new.

Wow, what a weekend. I think this must be the most intensive LD experience I’ve had so far (and I’ve had some fairly full on ones before). It’s been a fantastic experience as it always is, but it’s been especially good spending the time with the Cambridge collective, so a massive cheers to them.

I’m feeling completely fuse-blown now, but in the best sort of way. I’ll make a proper post-mortem later when I can think straight again. Looking forward to playing everyones games over the coming weeks.

Well, I decided to enter what I’ve got. It’s not really a game, but you can, uh, look at planets? You might like it for a few seconds. (Some people expressed an interest in the source, which is of course included. It’s a horrible mess though, and not really the best way to do this kind of thing.. (also it’s unfinished))

Anyways, you can get it here

Feels good to finish a game for once (and have time to add a rudimentary hint system too). And, you never know, it may even be fun. Woo.

Obligatory portals are included.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=2661

Here is another screenshot of our game coming together. A simple GUI layout was added with an animated EKG style life meter (WOW!).

Now that all these assets are in place, it’s only a matter of time before it’s an actual “game”, in the sense of the word.

As always, you can see each snapshot of our game by visiting out website at http://www.certainlogicstudios.com/projects/nano-something/

Build #3

I hit a horrible bug around half 4 today (well, more like a series of bugs) and gave up. But then realised what the solution was, and fixed it, too late for the compo. But I might be able to get it done for the jam

(If you’re wondering, the bug was dialogue… which you can see is fixed in the screenshot! ^o^ If only I had time to mess with the font…)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=412

Too lazy to write a proper post.

It’s done, just in time!

Ta-dah: New addition to the “warrior” series yet again… meet Drill Warrior!

Click here to go to the official compo-system page of the entry!

Download FINAL v1.0.0 http://jet.ro/files/DrillWarrior.zip

(or grab source)

Welp, LD48 is over… probably by the time I’m done this post.

It was my first one and will definitely not be my last.

In the end there was still a lot I wish I could add. I’ll most likely keep working on it and hopefully release a bigger, better, and less buggy game.

I’m not sure how this works but if you want to check it out goto: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=preview&uid=3202

Will be putting up a timelapse later.