Hey all,

If you’ll forgive a bit of advertising here, I thought this might be useful for you all. My company (ngmoco / DeNA) has just publicly release their mobage (moh bah gay) game SDK publicly, which allows you to write games in Javascript on top of a library similar to Cocos2D or Slick and then run it on iPhone, Android, and Flash. It also is backed by a giant social network so you get access to lots of users, achievements, badges, etc., and you can deploy both in the US and Japan very easily.

I’ve used it personally and find it easy to work with and fast. I figured it might be useful to a lot of you guys who want to try out the mobile market. Let me know if you have any questions.

https://developer.mobage.com/

Since some of you suggested I make the games and only worry about polishing any later, I’ve decided to take that advice.  I’ve also decided to shorten the length of each of the prototypes to 1 week or 10 hours.  Yes it’s so little, and yes so little that my first LD catch-up game suffered from the amount of time I didn’t put in.  But I’m thinking it will hone my skills, not to mention not take a whole year to do all 20 themes.  Instead it should be about 2-3 months.  Then I can decide on how and what to improve on.

And unless I get an overwhelming response to this change (from 30 hours to 10), this is my final decision.  If any of you raise any logical objects I will hear them and respond accordingly.

Thanks

Would it be a better idea to do all the LD Catch-ups and just keep doing them until done (about a year and a half’s worth of work), or should I instead continue to work on a single game until it’s viable for release online?  I realize it means getting through all the LD themes in a much longer time span… say 5 years give or take.  (Let’s say I did one game every 3 months).  Would it be better to do 21+ complete games within 5-6 years, or 21+ prototypes in a year and a half?

What are your thoughts?

Also, check out the PRIOR Post Mortem to see how the development of this thingamadoodle.

My entry for Ludum Dare 19 – PRIOR – has gotten some love post-compo, both in development and in release. After another 100+ hours of work (updates, tweaks… BUG FIXES! >_< ) I released it on FlashGameLicense and was sponsored by Armor Games.  Since then, the game has received a ton of plays on portals all over teh interwebz, and I’ve been blown away by the community’s reception to it.

PRIOR's "Box Art"

PRIOR also got nominated for the Canadian Videogame Awards – I didn’t see that coming, but it was a huge honor. Of course, this was after a few hundred hours worth of post-Compo updates, but this was mostly bugfixing and gameplay tuning. The game overall was largely still the same as at the end of the LD48

Overall, I think Ludum Dare 19 was the most productive 48 hours of my life – it’s certainly paid off! Thanks again to the Ludum Dare folks for setting up an excellent Compo

Play PRIOR on Armor Games

And feel free to discuss the storyline. As the developer, my absolute favorite part of this game is watching people figure out what the hell is going on!

Now a new LD catchup is upon me so I turn to the Guardian theme.  I’ve decided to spend tonight sort of brainstorming.  I may draw some diagrams some temp-temp art and maybe a mini-design doc, or more like a design outline.  My idea for the Guardian thing may not be new at all.  In fact it’s a take on a well worn game genre, the space invaders type of game.  Well what could you guard in a space invaders game.  The player, “Duh”.  You know those little barriers from the original game that protected you briefly from the shots of the enemy.  Well this time you ARE the barrier and you’re going to protect the “player” which will be some sort of AI-thing.  This game should take approximately 30 hours give or take, but no more than 32 hours.

Finally, I managed to get myself to try developing Flash-games (instead of Winforms/GDI+/DHTML).

The result:

24hrs after installing FlashDevelop

http://pixelsiege.net/beta/small

http://pixelsiege.net/beta/big

(more…)

Final version of LD catch-up #0 – same as in previous post but included here for completeness.

Okay a brief readme:

Who am I?

Keith Weatherby II otherwise known as Uhfgood

What is this?

It’s a game made in 10 hours based on the Ludum Dare #0 (beta) competition with the theme of Indirect Interaction.  It was a 24 hour test compo, and since I have only about 2 hours a weeknight to spare I decided to do this one within a week.  My upcoming games will be about 3 weeks or 30 hours.

The rules are simple move left and right and dodge the rocks.  See how many levels you can pass.

The source code is copyrighted by me as well as all content including the lovely <ahem> art.  Source code is free to use as you like (although I doubt you’ll even care to use it).

It was written with FlashDevelop and the Flex 4 SDK as well as Flashpunk.  The FlashDevelop project with flashpunk is included in the source distribution.

Here’s the source.

Timelapse will be forthcoming.

Well, I finally know what I’m going to be making. The problem, if you can call it that, is that it actually has potential to become a fully formed game. So we’ll see about how much time I take (probably more than 48 hours), and we’ll see about whether I make everything myself (probably no, and I’m referring particularly to music).

I have a lot of stuff going on, so it might be some time before I finish, but I hope it works out to be what I think it could be.

Edit: In fact, it might be quite a while  until I do any of it. Chances are that I won’t even start within the next two weeks.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

And now the link to the semi final version – HERE

And now with more game!

Here’s the link to the new demo.  Left/right arrows to move, and avoid the rocks.  Game starts over once ended.

LD00 Demo number 2

BECAME…

Robot Wants Kitty was my entry for LD16 – Exploration, a simple Metroidvania game shrunk down to LD proportions.  I made it in Flixel (Flash library), so just as an experiment, I thought I’d put it up on FGL and see if I could get any sponsors.  I first spent about a week enhancing it a bit (the big upgrade was music by DrPetter!).  Then the sponsor search exceeded my wildest expectations!  I got a decent deal, and a lot of interest, and (foolishly) signed up to do 2 sequels with the same sponsor.  With such a popular game, I could’ve done much better putting the sequels out for bidding individually.  I just didn’t have that faith in my game!  Remember kids, believe in yourself!  And knowing is half the battle!

You can play the post-LD version on Kongregate among many other places (like Hamumu!).  This all led inexorably to a pile more Flash games which made me a lot more money than I had been making in downloadables, so it was like a complete renaissance in the way I do business.  Everything’s different now!

Then eventually during my heady flash-making days, Raptisoft approached me about porting Robot Wants Kitty to the iPhone.  I was happy with that, but what I totally didn’t expect was that he was going to massively expand the game, as you see in the screenshot.  I expected a straight port, but what we’ve got is obviously totally upgraded visually, has six levels instead of one, and has a built-in level editor, with user level sharing to come soon.  It’s done awesome on iTunes in the week it’s been out, hitting New & Noteworthy in the Adventure category (not overall… yet), and so far garnering 21 five-star reviews, one 4-star, and three 1-star (people who couldn’t get it to run for whatever reason).  Go pick it up, the best $0.99 you’ll spend today!  I didn’t have much to do with creating it, other than making four of the levels and obviously the original concept.  Raptisoft really made something great out of it.

I know it seems a bit early but that thing up there pretty much explains my post ^^

I am gonna participate LD #20.. Uh, yeah.

Weapons of Choice:

Game Maker (again =| )

Paint.net (Sprites)

sfxr (Sounds)

Windows Notepad (My thoughts, concepts, timelog and evil plans to take over all cookie factories)

So, see ya all :]

- Folis

Well here it is… the next screen.  This time with rocks!  And a demo

Demo here: http://www.gamesafoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/LD00.swf

Tomorrow I hope to add some sort of gameplay, I guess with time running out, I’m going to make it continually speed up and allow you to hit the rocks thereby restarting.  Or something like that.

I’m finding it especially hard to come up with actual game play or game mechanics for Indirect Interactions. So to give you an inside view on what I am thinking (and this isn’t just from the last couple of hours; I have thought about this for a couple of days before my last post), here are some of the ideas or directions I might be coming from:

1) Rube Goldberg machines

I like this idea but I think it might be too much for a supposedly 48 hour contest. (And wasn’t LD0 a 24 hour thing anyway?). Also, I think it has been done enough. Thirdly, there is an implementation issue. Unless I think of some really good system, I would have to either make all the objects have defined input and output (making everything systematic but hindering player creativity) or hard code every possible interaction (either this is a huge amount of work or I don’t have many objects). Finally, I would have to make realistic artwork (uh oh).

2) Hit men

If this needs explaining, instead of killing someone, you interact with them indirectly by hiring someone to kill them. Disclaimer: this is my math teacher’s idea; I was bouncing ideas off of people and this is something he thought of. Now I don’t have much of an analysis for this, but I do have a problem: I’m not sure what kind of game this would be. After all, if you control the hit man, this becomes direct interaction. So what is the actual game play mechanic? Choosing who to hire for which job? Doesn’t sound very fun.

3) The butterfly effect

I just don’t know yet. But here is a big thought: butterfly effect implies time travel. Maybe (and I haven’t thought about this scenario much yet), you were sent back in time by a government to step on a specific butterfly to cause a natural disaster in a country you are at war with. You arrive about 100 years late, and now in order to complete the mission you would need to step on all of that butterfly’s descendants. But you can’t step on other butterflies because they might cause anything. Then again, this is just an old game mechanic with a new story put to it. Maybe this game isn’t what I want, but I’m not discarding the butterfly effect yet.

So there you go. I’ll keep thinking and what happens, happens.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

It seems that Uhfgood has started something. In his post here, he stated that he would be catching up with everyone who has been here from the beginning of LD. He will spend 3 weeks, 2 hours a weekday making games for each of the LDs that he has not participated in.

I will be joining him.

I intend to work through all the themes just as he does, but I will do it slightly differently. First off, I won’t limit myself to any specific period of time per game. If it takes 2 months, then OK. If it takes one weekend I’m happy with that too. I will try not to turn the games into full blown projects; they should still be on the level of something completable in 48 hours + idea development time. But if they do get blown out of proportion, oh well. Similarly, if I fail at making some specific theme, then that’s too bad (but I’m moving on).

I will be using Flash, and if I turn out anything presentable, I will try to sell it or get it sponsored. Therefore, I will not publish my source code. In addition, since I’m hopeless at art and music, I will not strictly follow the whole “everything made by you during production” rule that we have for LD.

Now about themes; because I draw a complete blank on some themes, I might deviate a little in a direction that my brainstorming brings me to. For instance, I am not sure whether I will be able to find a game idea for LD0 so if I come up with something in the process of figuring this (the fact that I can’t come up with an idea) out, I will make that something despite being off theme. I will keep you updated on every game I am in process of making for this LD catchup, whether on theme or not.

I will be putting the games up on… well actually I’m not sure where I will put the games, but when it gets to that, I’ll let you know.

And another thing. I intend to start completely from scratch at the start of each LD, but this decision might change.

In fact, any of this might change. We’ll see how everything works out, and I’ll post my thoughts on LD0 Indirect Interaction soon.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

YEY!

please come visit my new page, and see what ya think:
www.fishcake.pellenproductions.com

cheers,

Well it took the whole two hours but I finally got a tilemap up and running. The tilemaps in this game are going to be dynamically generated. but at least we have something resembling a river. The first one is the regular screenshot, the second one is an error. I’m using Flashpunk and apparently the tilemap seems to be getting created correctly, or at least the map array is.

myself and a group of friends are hoping to make a indie game for the xbox!

this was my original concept  of  the game.

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/164960-silhouetta-demo

this will be our first real game… hope you like the concept!

This time I added two basic “bank” rectangles (just to show where they are) until I decide what will go int he background. And two cloud images (which are merely two colored rect images, I’ll be updating the images in the coming days). You can actually move this left and right but it doesn’t do much other than that.

I had to actually “re-learn” flashpunk a bit here… but I finally got my first screeny up. What I came up with for indirect interaction is a game like Toobin’ where you navigate rapids in an inner tube. But since you can’t directly control the player, I decided that you would use the winds to change your direction. But instead of an inner tube I decided to use a raft, maybe like Huck Finn traveling down the Mississippi River and you have to navigate things like sharp rocks, whirlpools, waterfalls, dangerous crocodiles and the like. Although I haven’t set up a definite plan for that yet. What you’re looking at is a rough raft graphic (just a brown rectangle) on a blue river (although I plan to change the blue because that’s too much of a sky blue.)