This weekend’s miniLD will be officially over at Midnight tonight.  That said, there would be no problem if you post an entry a few hours late.  We will close the submission form on Monday around lunchtime.

Remember: you do NOT have to finish your game – we warmly welcome all submissions including failed projects.  Post whatever you have – just for fun – bugs and all!  Ludum Dare is great for learning new things and the short 48 hours format doesn’t leave time for polish.  A simple prototype, demo or even just a title screen is still an accomplishment.  =)  We don’t mind a few rough edges.

Good luck finishing your games today!  Enjoy the process and don’t stress about the final product.  Whatever you end up with, even if it is a broken piece of junk is worthy of submission.  We promise to be kind with our comments!

Well, this weekend… Ahh… Nothing worked.

But, anyways here is an extremely boring game which is actually my first ever Flashpunk game.

No release yet, though, only a screenie.

Yay! Messed up game.

Homing rockets, extremely hard boss, shopping, inter galactical routes, and so on.

I’ve created all the art I need for my game now. Armed with a working game engine, some backgrounds and a few character portraits, I have all I need to be able to dive in tomorrow and write, write, write. Check out the silly lolcat and his various expressions – from neutral to angry to scared to downright strange. Time for some sleep! =)

My engine works! It’s not pretty. But it works. The code isn’t great, but I’ve learnt a fair few things about programming in C++ and using SFML – seeing as though this is my first game in C++.

There are a lot of things that are quite hard to do that I take for granted in my other game development tools. Things such as getting a nice GUI and even organising screens/menus is quite a hassle. I’ve learnt that I’ll need to plan the classes and architecture better for my next game. I find it quite straight forward to do game logic, but actually displaying it I find a bit annoying!

I’m going to do all the story writing now and then I’ll probably release a first version.

Sorry… My ability, time, and maximum stress level fell far short of where I expected… so no little school girls killing zombies with dialogue… I simply have far too much to do tomorrow and during today, I was unable to work due to unexpectedly changing bedrooms and having to get my stuff out of my old room and into my new one… That took a good… ah… 15 hours considering all of my junk, my brothers’ junk, and my sister’s junk. Also, RISK is extremely distracting, but that’s my own fault.

However, I do have a decent framework for an engine, a timelapse, and a picture of one of the characters… The important thing is that I got a basic framework piece done that I really needed, the dialogue system. Along with the smoooooooth 8-directional movement from another side project of mine, I could prolly pull it off, just not this weekend. I’ll post what I have, but it’s not going to be entered as a MiniLD game. I’ll probably end up using pieces of this, like I do with everything, in a single major project.

I will make sure to do better on the actual LD48-21 in August.

Timelapse: http://adf.ly/1v8dB
What I have so far: http://adf.ly/1v8el
Character picture: http://adf.ly/1v8gF

So I have a really basic game, you can speed it up, make the cavern tighter, looser, more varied etc.  There’s a ghost drawn of your ‘ship’ of where the pitch is bringing you to.  There’s a frequency graph on the left, your selected frequency range is shown in blue.

Be aware. “Unknown” is sending his forces, computer viruses that are trying to vanish you. More about my MiniLD #27 game, you can read here. I am making progress with code, and also today I’ve done a lot of art. So here is my screenshot 3. Comments?

Text with text wrapping is now working! I solved my major problem in writing this engine. I had to split the string to render by whitespace, and then insert linebreaks when the length of the words was greater than the screenwidth.

Threads that helped:

Now to generalise the splitting code so that I can also use it on the player’s response choices.

Just woke up, Sunday here 10AM (Australia). I worked out the storyline for my game while lying in bed this mornin, debating whether or not to get up. I’d let you know it now but it would spoil the game. I think it’s pretty cool and will allow a few different places for branching the story in different directions. The secret phrase: “I think we can work something out…” actually fits in perfectly as well and I’d totally forgotten about it. So that’s good to know.

Here’s my plan of attack:
1. Finish dialog engine to display text and allow you to choose an option. (Problem: I don’t know how to wrap text with SFML.)
2. Build the dialog/game!

I’m working on a visual novel about a person who wakes up to find the world empty. It’s one of those old scifi trope premises (like The Quiet Earth, for example) — but this won’t be science fiction in that it won’t preoccupy itself at all with the “how.” Instead it’s a story about the more mundane experiences this person has in an empty world.

For the backgrounds, I’m using creative-commons photos from Flickr, with some cropping & other adjustments.

I’m using the Dating Sim Engine from Ren’py, so it has this day planner interface. Depending on what you choose for the character to do each day, a few invisible stats are tweaked. The stats have a few different impacts: they affect the character’s dreams, determine which ending you see, and some activities have special events that only occur when you do them with certain stats at certain levels. So hopefully that adds some dynamism to the story!

I’m going to take a break from coding now to work on some music, and then I have a bunch of writing to do before tomorrow

FINALLY I have completed my game engine.  I have no plot whatsoever, nor do I have any gameplay, but a working prototype of all functionality required is done at last.  I wasted two hours trying to get sound and permissions set up properly for the smartphone version of my game, but when (after 35 different test compiles) I finally had everything working, I felt so great!

I now have a visual novel engine capable of handling multiple-choice scenes, can display jpg backgrounds and png avatars which smoothly fade in and out, can play mp3 music and voiceovers, and it all works on Win/Web/Android.  Now that the base code is there, it is time for me to actually work on the “game” part!  Whew!  I almost gave up on the sound and mobile parts.

I love that feeling when you’re so frustrated, about to give up, and you keep saying “I’ll just try one different method, maybe it will work this time” and at long last you finally hear your mp3 over the speakers and it is like a huge weight floated off your shoulders and you know: it was worth the persistence.

NEVER GIVE UP!  YOU *CAN* DO IT!

Here is my silly little game engine running on my phone:

I finally managed to progress with my game. Although there isn’t much to see in this screen right now i am focusing on code, and then art more.

Game will be in 800×600 resolution with windowed and fullscreen option. Feedback? Comments? Critics? You are welcome.

Hi jammers! It has been super exciting seeing your progress even at this very early stage. Just wanted to put out a friendly reminder to everyone who uses twitter: post screenshots and tag them with the #screenshotsaturday hashtag so that users can see your wonderful creations in their twitter streams as well as the community website www.screenshotsaturday.com made by our very own pekuja.

Keep up the awesome work!  You guys freaking rock.

I haven’t written a line of code yet, but am really excited to be so focused on story for this competition.  I’ve been toying with a character idea for an adventure game, and this competition has really helped me flesh out the premise and direction for that game.  I don’t want to give away too much so early on, but i’m writing dialog to introduce this character as a kind of prequel (if you can still call it that when it comes out first) to the forthcoming (assuming all goes well) adventure game.  All of the player’s input will be made by finding and selecting words in a word find.  I hope this adds elements exploration and accomplishment to more classic adventure dialog systems.

I don’t have any game screens to share yet, so here’s a before and after of my dinner last night: Kung Pao Chicken.

Our team this time is me, @harielz and @link_san. We’re using AS3 with FlashPunk. Yesterday we started working on the dialogue system, which is mostly done now. Audio is also almost complete, so we just need to work on the conversation trees and the art. (more…)

I wasnt shure about entering but after reading the secret phrase yesterday, I woke up this moring with an idea aching to be implemented.

the game is pretty simple you go into a tmple where 3 wise men are waiting to answer your questions and when yousay the right thing you can fill in their role to answer questions yourself, the game will run online of course and so with every game the 3 wisemen hopefully become mroe wise as they have more questions and answers to tap from..

what do you think?

I’m going to use node.js and nodester for the server and html5 canvas for the game interface hope I get everything done in the weekend.

Just most of the code so far. It’s small and simple and it works

The more difficult part of the code is actually displaying it without using console! That’s where SFML comes in.

Well, over the past few weeks I’ve worked a little on an engine to use for this mini ld. There are still bugs, but I made a little example program with the thing to hopefully help motivate you to enter the mini ld.

Without further ado, here it is, a little sample of what my engine can do.

EDIT: Here’s an updated version!

Hope you enjoy it!

(I’m the31 in IRC, by the way.)

I’m starting my miniLD entry for the All Talk theme. I’m going to be using C++ with SFML and Code::Blocks as my IDE to create a text-based conversation game. The game will give you some text from a person talking about you will be given some options to reply with. Each different option will branch to another option, so the game will be a full conversation with lots of replayability for different scenarios and endings. I only have a very vague idea for the storyline, but I think it will develop as I write each part.

I’m starting the engine right now. I don’t think it will be very tough. The main work will come from writing and linking all the conversation pieces together.

I hope to learn how to effectively distribute my C++ games with SFML for multiple platforms – but starting with Windows, since this is the first time I will be making a game in C++, let alone using SFML. I typically use MMF2.

This is my first time to enter this competition. I am developing 2d platform/puzzle game. It is called “Saving his code”.

STORY

Game is about two friends Tim and John. Tim is a game developer. One night unknown hacker stole his game source code. But… Tim has a big problem! He must finish his game in 10 days, and he doesn’t have his source code. So he calls John to help him find the guy that stole his source code.  In that point your mission starts!

TOOLS

I am developing this game in GameMaker. For graphics I am using Inkscape (vector art) and GIMP for rasters.

SCREEN 1
I started making this game before couple  hours ago, so this is a first screen…  Main menu.

Main menu 1st build (Click to enlarge!)