So I had about 3 hours to make a game from scratch, because of my crazy schedule.  After doing the keynote video with my old mac I thought I’d try an old mini D/A style game, because for one thing those games were tiny sized and should be doable pretty fast.  However, this still took a while and I was disappointed with the lack of cross-platform testing I got in (doesn’t work right on linux firefox, but works on windows firefox… wtf?  Anyhow, thanks for that Oracle.  Way to make java cross-platform compatible).  I was really happy with how the applet actually came together architecturally and how closely it matches what I wanted it to be.  Unfortunately there is one bug I found with the tornado, but I can fix that post-ld and I hope to make a suite of smallish survival games like this to help people play with the supposed “right thing to do” in various simplified survival scenarios.

I just noticed, that the menu still reappears when changing/reloading the map, but game isn’t paused, I thought I fixed this, but appearantly I didn’t. If anyone is interested in a fixed version, here it is:

Post LD bugifed version

If you find any more bugs, feal free to leave a comment and I’ll try to fix it and update the Post LD version.

NOTE: the fixed version is NOT the entry, the official entry has the bug in it (unfortunately).

Final update:  the dang download died at 94%, hit bandwidth cap.  argh! sorry all.  I do have the zip still though.

I created a zip of all the games.  1.5 gigs.  Where do i put that? lol. no idea.

Update: trying to upload to a big file site.  Says they will hold up to 2gb.  says it will take a while, i’ll post the link here when its done.

I tried to zip all of them together, I think I got nearly all but with 305 it’s hard to say for sure without it taking forever to make the zip, and some of the web ones… i’m not sure how it handled those, but the various source/bin archives should all be here.

Note:  For future reference, it would make lives a LOT easier if you name your zip/etc something like your user id + game name, there were many “ld 20″ and related and if you have a great downloader, that works, but for me it may have overwritten several of them.

Update: ~20-30 of them had server errors, etc. and so they didn’t get pulled down.  If you added a file, i’d double check it’s upload location because that’s a pretty high number so it could be you got d/l capped or similar.

Also a question: how far can you get in zelda if you don’t “take this”?  Without cheats?

I’m going to give up. There’s no way I’ll be able to finish a game at this point.

I’m sad. If I had slept better Saturday night, I’d have been able to work on Sunday. Could’ve been, but wasn’t.

It wasn’t my best LD. I’m looking forward to the mini next month. Maybe I’ll be able to redeem myself. Until then, I’m just going to try to work on something to keep myself busy. Going to try to find a job for the summer, too. Probably at a grocery store. Hopefully that’ll work out well.

Happy coding,

— Mr. Dude

I posted a better version of my game. You can see it here :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2982

NOTE : this enhanced version is not intended for evaluation purpose ! It was posted AFTER the deadline and so, doesn’t fit the LD20 rules ! If you want to test & evaluate my game, please play the normal version.

Can’t work on the compo today , but we should be able to finish after work hours

Lots of nice games released yesterday !

The time-lapse caps from my PandaBot entry.

This comes from the Mac App “ScreenNinja” at http://getscreenninja.com/

I’m happy now Was expecting it to be a bit more difficult than it was, however I did need to optimise rendering to get it up to speed due to working in a VM – didn’t want to take the risk and release something suboptimal! Didn’t think I would get it done till later in the week, however I now know that I have a working setup on my Mac for doing Windows ports for the rest of the LDs to come!

Tomorrow: Playing all the awesome games people have made!

[ ENTRY | PLAY THE GAME [Web - Flash] | Sources]

Your spaceship crashed on an unknown planet called Earth and where inhabitants seems to live in The Middle Ages. There is kings, knights, princess and treasure hunters but they all appears to be cowards.
So your grandpa decided for you that you will explore dangerous dungeons on this planet in order to get loots and treasures and sell it in your brand new shop. Yes, you have a shop where people comes, buy a treasure and claim to every one that he has explored the dungeon, killed the monster and got the treasure
With enough money you will be able to repair your ship and get the hell out of this damn planet !

Left & Right Arrow : Move
Up Arrow & Space : Jump (when jump available)
Down Arrow & X : Interact
C & Z : shoot (when gun available)

There is some bugs :

• If your character don’t appear on the screen after changing area, I’m sorry but you’re screwed… this is a shitty tips but try to avoid returning to already visited area (when you don’t have to).
• You can’t re-enter your own shop… (anyway you don’t have to do that to finish the game)

A bug fixed version will come soon. I’ll made a new post about it.

My mother always told me: Never leave home without your heart – or else you’ll be attacked by exploding ghost cats.

The Heart is Safe

What’s the current policy on bug fixes?

People have found a couple of bugs on my entry so far (one pertaining ambient light levels, the other the behavior of the ESC key)… I’m I allowed to correct these bugs (since the first one kind of ruins the second level, and the other is just silly)?

I also have another bug concerning full screen (if the resolution is not that of the desktop, it just shows a black screen), would like to fix that so that people don’t have to edit a text file…

I remember we had some compos that allowed for bug fixes after the end, but I’m not sure what’s the current status…

Firstly: I’ve uploaded all of my notes that I wrote during the competition to here, and added a link to them on my submission page.

What Worked

No Framework

From what I have gathered from it, not having a massive framework to use helped me get what I wanted done more quickly, as I wasn’t spending time trying to get the code to work with the framework. Also, not using a framework meant that I’d often just write something that was basic and worked (GUI Especially) or use existing code without writing a class for it, instead of going overboard.

Modular Code

This time around, I think I’ve gone for a more modular approach to the code. Which made me reuse the core much more than what I did in the last submission (The player and enemies use the same movement logic, except that the input for the player is controlled by actual keys). This made it somewhat easy to fix any issues that arose, as all I would have to do is change one file instead of multiple files.

What Didn’t Work

No Framework

The only downside to not using a framework was that if I needed anything, I’d have to spend time implementing it. I think the solution here is to find a point at which the framework doesn’t impede code development, while at the same time providing useful tools that can be reused through each project.

Too Big of Idea

While the core idea for this game was quite simple, I (once again) decided to go slightly overboard with the ideas that went on top of it, which resulted in majority of the features not getting implemented, or quickly tacked onto the game to make it playable.

Basically: Next time, keep it even more simpler

What Could Be Improved

Cross Platform Development

Once again, I chose to use C#, which effectively limits playing to people who have a Windows machine. A better alternative would be to use Java or Flash so that people from multiple platforms can play the game. This is something that I will look into before the next LD.

But once again, I had fun working on this game! Bring on LD #21!

Okay, in retrospect I’m not that unpleased with my entry.

Anyway about my first LD. When the theme was announced, it was 4 am in the morning here (in Budapest, Hungary, Europe). I was still up working on something else. I have to admit I didn’t even know what was this sentence about, I had to google it. My first thought was OMG. My second was a Katamari Damacy/Nibbles-crossover, in which you are with someone going somewhere and people keep approaching you and obtruding various shit on you. So your inventory gets longer and longer. Another idea: Nyan Cat getting balloons and sandbags at random times so you have to balance her. Another idea: Robot Link Attack, you get the sword in the intro and then keep running and “dashing” with your sword. Another idea: something about Adam who gets Eve so as not to be alone. Another idea: vertical shooter about boy and girl in love, who fight aliens with a link of “laser hearts” between them. Another idea: something about a lot of prey animals who avoid being caught by predators by going in a crowd (it’s a real-life phenomenon and I like biology).

Then I fell asleep at 5:30 in the morning, got up at 10, tidied up my place, went to the railway station for my gf, and then a wedding until 4 in the morning. I was hoping to get a lot of ideas from real-life experience and asking friends. It didn’t work at all. At least I could chill out and not care about LD. We went home and slept until 2 in the afternoon.

Okay, 34 hours already gone and I have still nothing. I’m thinking about the Nibbles thing and I don’t remember why was it fun at all. So I try a Flash version and realize that it’s *not* fun at all. Okay, Nibbles dumped, let’s get this vertical shooter going. I know I don’t have the brains, the time, the talent to make decent graphics by myself. My gf is a graphic artist but it’s a lonely compo so I cannot “use” her. She’s watching Porco Rosso thankfully in Japanese so I can concentratre on the game. Anyway I bump into the Silk Icon Set made by famfamfam.com. That’s when it gets clear that the two main characters will be penguins: Linux Tux is the cutest icon in the set.

So, two tux penguins and a heart bumping left and right between them. Feels a bit like Pong. In about two hours I have a “working” version. It’s not fun at all, speed not right, enemies not right, intro not right, no music and sound fx. I start looking for a good piece of music. The Crow: City of Angels and then Restoration going muted in the background. It seems like all the great music in the whole wide world is protected by copyright. I even google “GNU music” but I only find some shit by Richard Stallman. Yes, he might by a black belt open source ninja, but not a musician. Finally I find Talco, an Italian ska band who make free music. Then it turns out it’s not that free, no derivates are allowed. Fuck!

Better forget the music and tweek everything else in the game. Sound fx by Dr Petter’s sfxr. It’s an awfully great tool, I have no idea how else could I get sound effects. I run through the Silk icons and copy every piece that could be an alien. I mean in some surreal cartoony suitable-for-small-kids world. Like a wrench, a basketball, an iPod, a key, a bell, a clock, etc. The only graphical work I do is magnifying and “blueing” the cloud icon to use it as a background animation. I even forget parallax (more layers of clouds running with different speeds) which would make the game so much better. Finally I get the speeds of the game and the scoring “system” right.

It’s 2 in the morning and I’m totally fed up with everything. At this point I hate not only my game but Ludum Dare as well. And I still need some background music. And yes, I find a lot of free music on Last.fm. After about 5 minutes of searching, I get Fot i hose by Casiokids. Nice indie music from Norway.

I can’t believe I’m ready! Let’s upload the game, submit the entry and forget about the whole thing for ever. 2:30 going to bed. Can’t sleep for about 2 hours, I got the “boogie” in my legs. Then I fall asleep.

That was it. My third gaming compo and my first LD. Thanks for the opportunity!

RL-friends pointed out that my soundtrack is kinda neat. If the embed doesn’t work, click here, Or just go play here to experience the entire thing. Or see the Ludum-Dare-Entry. Either way, go play

-Matthew

A quick upload of my timelapse. On this ocassion i slept a lot and i set chronolapse to 30sec shots, so in general the whole thing turned out to be quite short..

It works as a timelapse, so here it goes:

25 hours of work, frame taken every minute, played at 30 frames per second (timelapse music: “Gloves Of Power” by dB Soundworks http://dbsoundworks.com/ ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlKWTmex1Zw

I used scrot and mencoder to put the timelapse together.

PLAY THE GAME online (flash): http://www.jarnik.com/pub/ld20/

I saw all these cool timelapse videos everyone was making so this time I wanted to do one too! I made a perl timelapse script and off I went!

Only… I forgot to start it the first few hours and I lost some screens in the beginning to some technical difficulties. It’s not always a good idea to throw up a script the day before heh, heh.

Anyways, here’s the result:

I made it! My first Ludum Dare! I uploaded it last night after which my big soft bed was the only thing i could think about. I’ve always struggled with perfectionism, so releasing something that’s rather half finished is kind of a step in itself for me.

I spent lots of time on a boss that never got finished and some graphics that never got used so I might try to finish everything up in time for the jam, if time permits it today.

Anyway, lots of fun, this! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep finishing what I start and join the next dare.

Entry is HERE!

We are shooting for a Diablo meets an 8 way shooter with an accessable mouse interface. The lookis starting to come together, but we don’t have that nice hallways + rooms feel yet.

You can shoot to kill now (finally)

So I recorded a timelapse of this LD48 – Chronolapse did a great job of capturing screenshots, although doing a batch resize+crop and high-quality encode from jpegs was a little trickier… The end result was pretty good, though:

And of course, the final game is here