Hi everyone, I didn’t participate LD some time but I hope this game will find it way on miniLD28 list.

This is what I have done yesterday.

I have used my previous LD engine. It is pure C++/OpenGL (GLFW). Graphics consists of 2D sprite units and 3D terrain. I have used some free sprites from net for soldiers. For now, player can select units with mouse and issue move command. My plane is to finish soldiers shooting each other and maybe to add some 3D tanks.

There’s no way I’ll make any good RTS AI in such a short time, so enemies will be some static soldier camps that player will have to eliminate.

That’s it for now.

I have a few really cool ideas, but all are a bit experimental and not fleshed out. I kind of wanted to do something simple and well-tread, with maybe a twist, as I haven’t really been making games in a long time. But I don’t have any simple, well-tread ideas that I care to put any time into. So awkward and experimental it is, if the mini-ld 28 is to be at all.

First idea – a “troop movement” game. In this game, you command a small squad of units, who are trying to achieve some objective. Your only controls are to change their formation, and choose when they halt or advance. I imagine the structure of the game to be similar to a scrolling shooter, but the gameplay is a bit simulation-ish, since you don’t actually control the units.

Example: you are in wide formation marching through a field. A few enemy units pop up but they are quickly taken down. A tank rolls across the top of the screen, taking out the top half of your units. Should have switched to a compressed formation! Your units would be sort of like health and firepower combined, and throughout the level you would have opportunities to call in various reinforcements. There will be terrain elements such as trenches or towers that have some advantage when they are used.

Second idea – war prevention god game. Two civilizations are being built in close proximity to each other. They get angry at each other at the slightest provocation. If one city makes fire before the other one, the raw meat eaters are likely to try and take out the guys with fire – with a bad outcome.As the game progresses, the cities get larger, so it takes more work to take them out, but they also get stronger weapons, making them more destructive.

You play a god who wants to try and keep both civilizations alive for a certain amount of time. You have certain powers, like raising mountains (to slow army attacks), raining down food when they are hungry so they forget about fighting, or raining down destruction to keep a potentially more bloodthirsty civilization from gaining too much of an upper hand. You have to temper your use of power though. If you rain down food on one city, they may worship you, but the other city will grow jealous, and all of a sudden the two nations are at war over you.

Hmph. The formation shooter will be easier to make, but hard to make well I think. The sim game will be hard to do everything I want to do in a short amount of time, as well as being even more experimental and difficult to determine if the gameplay even works. I am leaning toward the god game, but worried that like most of the sims I have made in the past, it will feel like you pretty much just watch stuff happen and there is not much gameplay.

Anyone have any advice?

On the technical side I’m torn between trying something new like flash, or sticking with my trusty python+pygame. Overall I expect more trouble with the game design than with any technical problems.

I made a lot of progress today! I’ll hopefully have a demo up tomorrow once I add some more game play.

Until then… Here’s a screenshot!

Okay, so I have done a lot of the groundwork for my entry, now it’s time to finish the design. I thought it was a good time to take a moment and post on my theme.

When thinking of war, the first thing that came to mind was the idiotic kids card game, War. If you haven’t played War,  it boils down to the world’s longest coin-toss: you and your opponent each flip over a random playing card. Highest card takes both. If the cards are tied, you add more cards to the wager. Repeat until someone runs out of cards. No way to affect the outcome, no strategy. The game is mindless idiocy, but some might say that makes it the perfect analogy for real war.

So, what can you do? In the game, you play a regular grunt, and it’s your job to stack your generals deck. In a top-down shooter, raid your opponent’s territory to force him to burn cards. Collect high cards and special power cards to give your a chances a boost. Complete objectives to keep from running out of cards, all while your mindless general is playing ‘War’ in real time.

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Just got back from vacation and I am getting right to work on making my entry. I’m thinking of making a pacifistic strategy game…

I’ll be using:

-Game Maker (again)

- A hip new drawing program I found called Paint.NET

I have a concept for the miniLD. I’m not sure how much of it I will manage, but I am aiming for my end result to be a working prototype.

There’s a bit of background to this one that I’m not sure how I’ll introduce in-game. Here goes:

We know of the Greeks and Romans and their pantheon of gods. And of the Egyptians with theirs. We know of many ancient civilizations and we know of the gods they worshiped. But there is one civilization we know nothing about. And it is their pantheon’s fault. The king of their gods had but one name: The Warmonger. And it was due to him that his people were wiped out.

So that’s the background info. By the way, if anyone has suggestions for how to put story (like that ^) into a game, please comment.

Read on for the actual game play.

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I noticed that NMS 2011 is held in my town the weekend after the mini-LD and having a family being away 2 weekends in a row wouldn’t fly at all. So i’ll start now instead.

Funnily enough my idea that i had a few miniLD’s ago (that i knew i wouldn’t have time to complete) fits perfectly with this theme so i’m gonna do it this time around instead(albeit with a different focus perhaps ).

The unglamorious halfdozen

Well, it’s the end of day two, so the link is the same, but you can actually move around!

Just FYI, if you use an arrow key to continue from the story, the character will start moving…

Anyway, art and such is in the Data folder, you can edit the map file using notepad

01 is the dirt, and 00 is the swamp, anything else will cause issues!

also, the first actual screenshot!

Let me know what you think of it so far!

Just thought I’d announce my intention to enter the Mini LD this weekend. My wife is away volunteering so I’m free to spend all my time making games.

Not sure what I’m going to create really. I want something relatively simple to build as it’s going to be done in Stencyl, but with lots of potential for fun level design. I may go for a game where you have to sneak around planting bombs on enemy buildings and then blowing them up. Perhaps it could be a puzzle/stealth hybrid or something. Who knows.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got to say on the matter. See you all then!

I’ve been working more on some of the backend stuff, so not much is done right now…

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32276379/To_End_The_War.zip

Well, I doubt that it’ll be too exciting, but hey, I’ve got more time today, and I’m pretty inspired (started FFVII again, maybe I’ll beat it this time!)…

Feedback, comments, critique, really anything that this site allows in comments is fine!

EDIT: My dev tools!

Language: C++

Library: SDL

IDE: Visual C++ Express 2010

Music: Musagi

Art: PAINT.NET

As a German I am not able to not participate in this Mini Ludum Dare. Thus, I’m in! But I don’t really have time for it, so I thought of a very simplistic gameplay which I hope to implement in less than a few hours. Currently I’m learning Flashpunk in my spare time – it will be used as the game engine for my little idea. Other than that I don’t know yet for certain. Probably Photoshop Elements and bfxr.

The early release of the theme for the mini-LD #28 has really got me excited. I have an idea that is probably not going to be unique, but I look forward to trying it out anyway. The waiting is killing me, though – I really want to get prototyping and trying out ideas.

I just hope I get all the time I need to work on it this weekend. This is my first participation, so my design is probably far to complex for the time available.

My intended tools are:

• Python / PyGame
• … maybe GIMP for graphics? That isn’t my forte.

As I only intend on producing a working prototype, I’ll be using the python language with the pygame library. I still haven’t decided on which tools I’ll be using to produce content, but I plan on trying a few on the tools page and deciding as the compo date approaches. If anyone has any advice about the tools on that page or other free tools that may work better, I am receptive to it.

Without giving too much away, my idea has to do with tribal warfare and simians. I want to model it after Advance Wars, but place more emphasis on sabotage, reverse engineering and intellectual development between tribes. There will be three simian ‘types’, each filling specific roles in the overall effort. Much of this is based on Planet of the Apes, but of course the game will not be using any copyrighted content. The game will be turn-based and units will have a ‘Vet’ system to improve their capabilities.

I will spend the next few days in my time outside of work writing the base code, which will consist of a loose framework, and I will spend the weekend building on top of the base code and creating content. On Friday I plan to post the base code I’ll be starting with as well as the full code and all assets on the last day of the compo. If all goes as I plan (which it rarely does), I’ll be using this prototype to produce a well-constructed game in a lower level language. Right now my eyes are on Java and C/C++. Going forward from there I would like to keep the project cross-platform, which some languages handle better than others.

Of course, I am receptive to advice that anyone has to offer. This being my first go at a competition, I realize that the head start we were all given might negatively affect my future endeavors with upcoming competitions. Hopefully that won’t be the case.

Thanks,

Mike

Gonna try to participate. That’s pretty much all I know for now. 90% chance of using Python /w Pyglet cause that’s pretty much what I always do.

So I will enter the mini-LD too, and it will be my second LD.
I hadn’t planned to enter even after seeing the theme, but then an idea popped into my head just before going to sleep.
The sort of idea that sticks and that I had to fight to not get up and start programming right away !

Instead I’m going to focus on game design a day before so I’ll only have programming and art to worry about. I’ll really be wary of feature creeping this time round, it basically stop me entering a polished version in my first LD.

So, the game ! No title yet, and it will be about WW1, the video game’s less used World War.
Basically, it will be a top down strategic game, where you will have reinforcements in men/money each day, a night/day cycle, and access to a bar of possible actions.

You will not have direct control over your men so it will be purely strategical. Actions will contain in exchange of money, or men, the possibility to charge to the other trench, order a retreat, call in air strikes, send in a scout to clear fog of war, call in direct reinforcements, man/repair the MG nests, fire flares… All important actions that will have to be used smartly to gain the other trench.

It seems complex but actually will not be that much : fog of war will be in two layers, one over the ennemy trench at all time and the other over the ennemy half of the battlefield at nighttime (permitting sneaky attacks from AI.). Scouts will be able to clear those fogs (Scouts being only a lone man send out prone.)

This is the last thing I want to have : being able to change stance of your attacking waves and scouts : setting them to prone will make them try to sneak up to the ennemy trench (apart from the scout that will stay at a safe distance) and setting them to stand will make them up to charge or retreat quickly. Prone will of course make them more difficult to be hit.

Of course all of this is my first idea, it will be fine-tuned the day before and I really hope to make it happen.

Good luck to all others that will be entering the mini-LD too !

Okay, due to time issues, I’m only able to do the Mini LD right now, I can assure you that I haven’t seen the theme until just know, and even then that was caught on the timelapse…

Anyway, my idea…

Sorry if it’s insanely huge, I make them at 640X480, which is what my games’ resolution is…

How does this tie in with war, apart from the title?

Well, the main(ish) character is at war with himself.

That and it’s a FFVII-ish setting, too

The FFVII theme becomes evident as with this image made in PAINT.NET, like most of my “screenshots”

The blue arrow represents who is talking, as it’s a birds-eye-view…

Thanks guys, I’m looking forward to my first (mini)LD!

Hello all,

Brandon from Critical Developments here.  This is my first game programming competition of any kind, so it will be a treat to see how well I do.  Being a junior at my local college for Comp Sci, I don’t have a whole lot of real development experience to draw off of.  Thankfully I just finished a software design course last semester, so that’s where I’m starting off.

Pursuant to that, I haven’t started looking at anything on the technology side yet, because I don’t have anything close to a full design yet.  I’m thinking that the basic theme is going to play off of the card game War, but how I’m going to spruce it up is still under consideration.

Any tips for the new guy?

Slick out.

While writing this I’m sitting in Boise, ID and going back home to Norway Wednesday the 27th. after a month long summer exchange. So my plan is splitting the development schedule up into two: Trying to get the programming/scripting/technical whatever during flight, or more if I get the time. I will be traveling for 12+ hours, so I’m hoping to get a lot done during this (if I manage to stay awake). Then I will try getting some graphics and sound done as soon as possible when I get home if not also on the plane. It will only be me and Game Maker up there while programming, so no interwebs or other stuff to distract me.
I’ve also got an idea for some gameplay and theme, but I don’t wanna share too much now other than it will probably be in the anti-war category. Don’t know if it’s been done before, but temporary(?) title is MWWAT?, pronounced “uhm, what?” and short for “Modern Warfare With A Twist?”. Just because it was the first title I came up with and doesn’t fit my idea at all.

My next post will (hopefully) be as soon as I get hooked up to the web after I land. Maybe I’ll be the first in the world to release a Mile High Game?

This game is disturbing.  It is based on actual war stories I heard from my grandfather.  Could you make impossible choices in order to survive a real war?  I don’t have that much content yet, but as I can remember more by the deadline, I will add them.

The ending is deliberately anti-climactic, because the real victory is just to live and continue.

http://devinmoore.com/actualwar/devinswar.php