So .. you’re a bit of a pickle and need to use your lady-brains to get you out of it … 

Play: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1087

Click to play

LD Page

Woohoo! Got it done and submitted on time! See my entry HERE!

This is my 2nd LD, and the first one that was really complete, so I’m quite proud of myself! I was going to do a full write-up, but I’m just too exhausted. Maybe tomorrow?

A few comments though:

The AI needs refinement. There’s only so much you can do under the time limit… and even less when you don’t actually know the game well enough to have a good strategy even for yourself, no less for a machine.

That said, the AI is pretty competent at Defending, despite sucking at Attacking.

I forgot all about running the whole screencap video thing this time! Eek!

Most of the sounds are me screaming or bashing things into my desk.

I am going to look into what it would take to refine this for an android/apple app!

Aaand… yeah! Good job everyone! I look forward to actually being able to participate in the judging this time; something I completely missed out on last time. Hundreds and hundreds of games to review! Eek! Too much fun!

And what a fun LD! Although Saturday night, my laptop died on me completely…Xcode wouldn’t reopen, ScreenNinja crashed and burned (and lost that day of timelapse). So no timelapse this time However, at the last minute I pulled a mechanic together. My game, Lost Psyche, never ends, but I succeeded in making a very cool music generator. It sounds a bit repetitive structure wise due to the same percussion over and over, but I’m very pleased with how my progression and rhythm seeds work to produce the right notes. This is a project I think I will expand upon in future, possibly as an AU/VST plugin to automatically write musical phrases. Certainly beats writing myself myself

Calm before the storm...

Anyhow, it’s been 26 hours since I woke up. I’ve decided not to sleep until at least 6p so I don’t wake up at a stupid o’clock! My current look I’m rocking for lack of sleep and hyper-caffeination:

I should have taken a before photo for comparison.

And a workstation aftermath photo. Not too bad, just 15 empty cans of Mother, and some bottles of well deserved Golden Ale, only 3 more in the fridge though

Rather tidy still...

So I uploaded my submission, unaware that the deadline was moved. Rats! I’ll fix it up, maybe add something here and there, but what I uploaded is probably the final version unless I find some major bugs that need to be fixed. To be honest, I’m burned out from this weekend. I’m very glad with my submission though.

For anyone that wants to play it, the download link is below. Some tips: buy the torch! Also, to escape, consider going back to your roots.

Download!

After a month of coding straight for work related projects, I should have known that I would have spurted and died when trying to do something in such a tight deadline. At about 11 o’clock last night, I dedcided against continuing my escape game and just wrapping up the few things I was working on. Normally, I would be sad of this, since I didn’t complete my established goal, but I think I got a lot done that I was proud of myself for doing and something that I can definitely take with me to another idea.

What went wrong:

• I went too big. The idea I had was an espionage, metal gear-esque game called “Sidekick Escape!” which would have featured you smuggling a sidekick that had its own mood meter. Not hard on its own, but the sidekick (A fairy, ala Navi. Some of you may see where this is going.) If it’s in the green, it would be complacent. If it was in the red, you are in danger of being detected by “Hey! Listens!” or potentially use her to make some sort of temper tantrum explosion of some sort. Items like Candy could make her mood meter go into the positive, with duct tape making her shut up but seriously decreasing her mood once it wears off. The levels would be single screen and would require some AI work that I hadn’t done in a long while (And I’m lazy when it comes to making enemy AI. ) and I didn’t realize how large of a scope I was making this on myself until I was knee deep into it. If I remember anything for the next LD, it’s that thinking simpler is okay.
• I slept too much, due to said exhaustion: Like I said, I’ve been working quite a bit in the last month and this was the first real weekend that I could call “free time”. I was already running ragged and I let the alarm clock go far too many times, losing valuable time in it. I’m terrible about doing this on a day to day basis anyway, so maybe I’ll have my sleep schedule in check for the next one.
• I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I let this get the better of me. When I saw how much further I had to go to get to my intended goal, I started slacking off more and more. It’s behavior I am working to improve myself on in the future. Not everything has to be perfect, especially for a game being made in a 48 hour time period, no matter how much I wish it to be.

What went right:

• Despite the theme being something I did not expect (I was really hoping on “Dreams” or “Self-Replication”, I think. I had good ideas for those!) I think the creative waterfall was let loose for me as I thought of random fun things for the game and the initial concept.  It was something that I missed and I’m glad to get the flow going again.
• I had fun working on it. I did! I had all these stupid details planned out for the game (I was going to name the main character “Sid” and the fairy sidekick “Ekic”, to go along with all the other bad puns.) that I can carry around to make this a full fledged game at some other time.
• I know have several classes set up for switches and bullets in AS3 that I did not have previously. And they best part is, they’re easily portable to whatever project I decide to work on next. Rockin’!
• The funny part is, choosing to relax than to stress out on the rest of the project was something that I think did indeed go right for me. It’s no good for me to try to push it when I’m already stressed out from work things. Let the mind rest. I played some Red Dead Redemption and tinkered with a bit more, but that was it. All in all, it still made for a good weekend and not a disappointing one. I do know this, however:  When the next one comes, I will be better prepared. And it will make the best thing ever. I promise!

Anyway, if you want to see it (I’m not going to officially submit it. While technically you do escape, it’s not much else.) you can go to http://crowbar.ripsystem.com/projects/ld21/ and play it.

Arrows control movement and A shoots bullets. Bullets will turn on wall switches and both enemies and players can affect hitting the switch to open the stairs to the next level (Something that would have been a key puzzle detail in the future.) All in all, I probably spent six hours on it, including sprites and stuff that did not quite make it because I was being lazy.

There you have it. Congrats to everyone who completed their game. If you’re like me and didn’t get that far, don’t be discouraged! Hopefully you learned more than a few things about the game making process that’ll make it easier for you the next time, just like me. See you next Dare!

That was a blast! I had no idea that I was even capable of completing a game so quickly. It almost makes me think that I shouldn’t spend as much time as I normally do keeping my code readable.

I wasn’t quite able to finish my game – no win/lose/ending; but I was still able to make something playable, and write some pretty advanced code (an efficient path-finding algorithm from scratch). Even though my game’s pretty boring, I am glad I participated in the competition. I believe it has made me a more efficient and more confident coder, and to an extent, artist. I will most definitely be doing this the next time around too. But for now, I’m going to take a break from coding. I’d say those 2300 lines should be worth at least a week off.

Phew. That was stressful. Having worked to fix a stupid bug for most of the evening there was not much time for balancing the game. I hope it’s not too easy. I’ll write more later, for now here are screenshots and a link to the game: http://danikgames.com/stuff/LD21/index.html. Now I need to sleep.

I finished my entry.

Play it here.

So glad I did this. My first Ludum Dare was a success. Lots of nice looking games here.

Here’s the timelapse (I forgot to run it in the beginning, and I forgot to run it at the end.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFTH9uU9BCg

Post mortem: http://shelbysblogk.blogspot.com/2011/08/ld21-entry-escape-infinity-postmortem.html

It’s not quite as finished as I would have hoped, but it’s playable and interesting. I just didn’t have enough to make “cool” graphics.

I was so budgeted for time I finished it with 16 minutes to spare.

To play you have to type commands and then Esca (The purple rectangle) will execute them. The goal is to escape from illiteracy.

Perhaps I’ll make a post compo version later.

After about six hours here and there I have finished a tiny irritating platformer, called Press Space, because that’s all you do…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5183

So I finally did it!

After a slow start coming up with an idea for the theme, i finally found my groove and worked towards finishing my game.

There are a million things I wish I had done differently, things that I needed cut to make the experience feel more cohesive, things that i intended to polish up but didn’t have time, and things that i probably should have taken out.  Audio also took a back seat this time, and i know that’s going to dent the overall experience, but i really was close to the wire as it was. Maybe i’ll have time to put it in a Jam version.

My take on the theme is as follows;

“You play the role of a magical seed that is buried inside the giant mountain. Your task is to escape from the mountain’s belly and into the sky, before it closes its mouth again”

I deliberately limited my palette and stuck to simpler forms as this lends itself better to the rapid design approach and is fairly easy to maintain. Going with a surreal fantasy theme also let me be more bold with art style (strong contrasts, mostly white ) which I hope makes it more visually distinctive and feel less prototypey ( is that a word? ). There are so many improvements I would want to make to this mainly to the character forms, and linework, but i’m still learning, so it’s the best i could do for now

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my second Ludum Dare ( I’m shattered though!). Interestingly, and more so than “Drum Hammer Dig”, I really feel like this game can be expanded on into a much larger experience, so i intend to come back to this game in the future.

In the meantime enjoy;

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4202

Tah-dah.

The game took me quite some time to do, but ended up very short. That’s what happens when you create levels by hand using code. The beginning and ending were a bit last-minute (almost literally), but I worked on little parts of the level throughout today.

I also ran short of time when I was programming the traps, so I had less time to make the levels. Towards the end of it, I realized a way to make it actually somewhat “fun.” Hopefully I’ll do better next time.

But that’s enough of me making excuses, please check it out!

This has been an odd experience. The main reason I love Game Jams like Ludum Dare is the sense of community I get while reading the blog posts. With the Website errors this Ludum Dare felt really lonely.

I will post a write up later. For now I am just glad to be done.

Unity Web version here:
http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld21/

A fun exciting game where the player is a square in a land of circles escape as fast as u can for the highest score. This was A blast to make even with limited time. Includes 3 levels and multi player, with a randomly generated map. Experience the pull of the bubbles at https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/eskapae%20from%20buble%20land.exe?w=64a0abbc

Have fun playing and thankyou ludumdare

~Gibby~

So I finally managed to get the game submitted.  I had a lot of fun doing this, and learned a lot.  Next time I’ll be sure to fully complete my game and have more than one level  My game can be played here!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=3501

I’m really quite pleased with how this turned out. Timelapse and post-mortem coming soon, but now sleep. Lots of it.

Abstraball is done! You can find it here

It’s a top down 2D-turned-to-pseudo-3D game in which you control a little yellow ball through a complex filled with bad guys. You can only see things that aren’t blocked by other things, so you can’t see past walls. Enemies have fully functioning AI, and they will patrol and guard areas. If they see or hear you, they’ll chase you, and if they touch you, you will die. A compass tells you the general direction to move to. There are 3 ‘areas’ the compass points to, the third being the end. Reach that and you win. You can sprint, but that makes noise and costs energy, so use it to get out in emergencies, and use it wisely. You can also creep to move slower, allowing you to peek around corners more safely. Leaning left or right allows you to peek around corners more easily.

There are 4 difficulty modes. The fourth mode, plague bearer, changes the game a little bit. While you are even weaker than the 3rd difficulty level, you will notice a few subtle changes. Additionally, as a plague bearer, if you touch an enemy that is not aware of you, then he will die. Make it to the end as a plague bearer and you will earn a virtual cookie for being awesome because I haven’t finish it yet that way.

I’ve added custom keybind options. It’s not perfect (it only supports keyboard, not mouse input) and there’s probably a few edge cases not working, but as far as I know it’s good enough for simple rebinds. So yes, I thought of you non-wasd-ers

I had a lot of fun creating this game, even though I know I could’ve done better. But due to some design decisions early on, it ended up like this. It’s not bad, but it could’ve been more. I’ll write a post-mortem in a few days, showing the few goods, the bunch of bads, and the oh so many uglys.

The first person to win plague bearer mode receives a virtual cookie of awesomeness

Here is my game.

Note:

I didn't have time to finish everything but, at the end (when you die) the game just closes.
The game is Untitled because the rules never said that it needed to be titled.

Story:
The year is 4535. The earth has undergone encounter with aliens and has trapped them on a planet.
The aliens have found a way to escape.
Shoot down as many of them as possible.
DO NOT LET THEM ESCAPE.

Controls:
Click to shoot

Move with:
WASD

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?l9sq23do1bb4ipf

Cheers.

Well, this was once again fun.

Agenda right now: SLEEP

Agenda later: A timelapse-video, I’ll upload the soundtrack, and see wheter that source-upload crashed again.

In the meantime, why don’t play a bit of Metal Sphere Solid? (it’s fun, I tell you )

LD-Entry

Web-Playable

-Matthew