Well I submitted my game.

The idea didn’t really come to me until Saturday night after I thought I just wasn’t going to get anything done at all.  Total time spent on this game was about 10 hours or so.  There isn’t much to it unfortunately, however the main premise of the game is expressed and it is playable.

It was alot of fun, now I’m looking forward to what I can accomplish next time with a full weekend of work.

If I could go back in time, maybe that’s what I should have named my Ludum Dare entry. Instead, though, here is “The ESCape”.

http://www.pxlgames.com/index.html

It’s a very ugly game and the first real game in HTML5 that I’ve gotten done so I focused more on handling the Canvas and Javascript than I did fancy sprites. The theme of the game is that you are an “Idea”, a white block navigating a “thought” maze. The player can use the arrow keys to navigate the maze and by pressing the Escape key, “change their mind” (aka, randomize the entire maze). The Idea is searching for various “Goals” though out the maze so that it can travel deeper and deeper. As the Idea travels into the thought maze, new obstacles such as grey permanent walls (was going to call them “Beliefs”, a la “beliefs set in stone”) and red “Doubts” (monsters) that randomly toss the Idea into another part of the maze. One the player gets through 20 levels, they get the ending I was, in my own heavy handed way, trying to convey.

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was a fantastic experience. I’m very very tired, learned a ton about HTML5/JS I didn’t know about (freaking inaccessible vars from setIntervals created within the object), and I am looking forward to participating in the next event and seeing the other submissions!

Submission page doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment. I’ll try again shortly.

my escape
controls: arrow keys and spacebar
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5333420/myEscape.html

I spent friday night and most of saturday apartment hunting, so I made my game in just over 24 hours.
I’ve definitely got some stuff to clean up, including letting you replay the game without refreshing the page

A door as envisioned by a post-modern programmer/artist

Ok, here is what happened since my last post.

[OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I was supposed to start working on the project yesterday after lunch but didn’t find the inspiration and was tired as hell so before writing a single line of code I took a short nap that somehow became a ~3hrs long sleep. I woke up around 6 PM and after coming back to my senses (around 6:30PM) I sat in front of the computer so I could start working on the game. I settled with Monkey as the programming language and made some progress with the code… but as the night fell I started running into some problems. I was not satisfied with the overall implementation of a few things and although I tried a few alternative ways I was not getting the results I wanted. My goal was to finish the game that night so I could spend the few hours I would have available on Sunday to make music/sound and better graphics.  Around 3 AM I discovered (by checking facebook) that DST  was to be resumed that night… so it was 1 hour later than what my clock was telling me. Having my time cut by my “little” nap and the damn DST, and frustrated because I was unable to achieve the results I wanted for the game, I decided to give up on the project.

I woke up this Sunday a bit before lunch, a bit depressed for having abandoned the project.

My sister entered my room and asked me about the competition and I told her I gave up on it last night. I remained on bed a few more minutes and then started thinking on my plans for the day.

I discovered I had nothing better to do, so after a few minutes, I decided to give it another shot at the project. I rescued the files from the recycle bin and started working on it again. Don’t ask me why I did that… I didn’t have a single reason to resume the project… in fact, it was quite unrealistic to even think it was possible to finish the game in the remaining time having already lost like 50% of the estimated time I had. But I was not in a hurry for finishing now… I was .. just curious to see how far I could go with it…

[/OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I actually got trolled by the clock. I checked the LD page and made my schedule according the remaining time it displayed. I should have grown suspicious that it was still telling me that the compo would end around 10:00 PM despite the DST, but I wasn’t thinking on the DST in that moment.

I managed to finish the game code around 8 PM, so I had like 2 hours to make some music. After trying a few programs from the LD tools page and realizing I didn’t have time to learn any of those I settled with composing the music with my DS (and the DS-10 Synthesizer) and record it on the PC with a stereo cable. It worked fine. I made the special FX with SFXR on my computer.

I wrote the sound manager module and then rebuilt the project. It worked fine except for one thing… background music was not looping. I tried a few things but given the time constraint I ended up giving up on it, leaving only the special fxs.

With like 40 minutes remaining until the end of the submission deadline I uploaded everything to my website and tried it on the browser.  It worked fine except for a minor thing… I was loading resources in the moment you need them, so the first time you face an open door, or any of the game screens, the game freezes for a second or so in order to load the image/sound. BAD.

I coded a quick and dirty image manager class that I could use to keep a cache of previously loaded images. Then replaced all loading calls for cache calls and added a few calls at the beginning of the code to cache the most heavy images (so they were already loaded from the start) and then uploaded the game again. Now it was working fine. As I didn’t write a cache for sounds you may miss a few sounds if they are too slow to load, but that shouldn’t affect the experience.

With only 18 minutes remaining until the end of the competition I finished uploading the game and submitting it into the compo. I was done.

I felt so relaxed that I kicked back and checked the IRC…. only to find that it was still 1 hour and 18 minutes until the end. Damn YOU DST!! LOL.

—————–

TL;DR? Managed to make the game. Don’t ask for the graphics as I had like half the time I was supposed to have (which was already around 1 day total). Had some problems but fixed them (although some compromises were done). Total time was around 8 hours including “art”, “sound”, and “music” (which was not included for technical reasons). Also, I’m bipolar.

HERE IS THE GAME!

P.S: You need to correctly avoid/enter 50 doors to win the game. Good luck with THAT!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2976

This actually turned out pretty well… Though it wasn’t exactly what I was going for, and the sprites are rather unfinished, the game works well, and I’ll probably end up using this engine, or a modified form of it, for a variety of random games.

Hey ! First time to participate

For 40 min have problems to tryp so submit my work D:

So get my game “Catch One, Leave One” on this link !

http://www.mediafire.com/?nk9w18j2evo7sfn

Wow!! It’s so cool that it’s now 12 hours more, it’s exactly what I need to finish my game. Now after 20 hours of coding and drawings with only 4 hours of sleep the night before, I need to rest!! HERE is my entry so far, sorry that it’s only for windows. So good night to all of those who is going to sleep, and good luck to all of those that still working.

First.  I finished my entry on time.  Second.  I had NO idea that I could make a game in a weekend.  Third.  I LOVE this game.  It brings me back to when I was obsessed with Gradius.  Fourth. Thank you to the people that made this possible because it was a real treat to be able to take part in it.

This competition really is incredible.  Not only do the participants get a chance to show off their skills, they also are learning the entire time.  This compo I started with the code from this flashpunk tutorial as my base and ended up with a game that I am definitely satisfied with.  You can play it here for now.  You can definitely count me in for the next compo.

After 48 hours the game is finished. I have generated levels, walking enemys that can hurt you and some kind of sound.

Use the arrow keys to play, escape pauses the game.

“You are Julie, last survivor of mankind and this is your story: About Julie’s Escape.

Your main goal is always to reach the escape point shown by a golden goblet, which is located in the corner diagonally to your starting corner. Beware! There are monsters creeping around! Do not touch them or they will hurt you, which leads to death after some time. The hearts at the top of the screen are showing your healthness.”

click here for entry

Gameplay video of Stranded, my Ludum Dare 21 competition entry

Stranded Gameplay

Stranded \”Behind the Scenes\”

Compo Entry Here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4703

Play it Now Here:

http://sandbox.lakehomegames.com

Things are starting to take a turn for the worse, CHRIS is having trouble with his coding, and i’m starting to get strapped for time on these expressions. But… if we can’t get this code to work then we have no game!

So, I did finish “Red Rover” and it’s in a much better state than my first LD submission was. I even have a title screen that explains keybindings!

Not sure when I’ll be able to get the submission page working, but the game is available here: http://plastic-idolatry.com/redrover-0.1.zip

Server problems and chaos whatnot aside, 

this Ludum Dare has been an absolute blast and I've enjoyed every moment of it.
Please give this game a shot and tell me what you think, I've really enjoyed making it.

I hope you find the game fun!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=1913

Enjoy guys~

Well, and the time as come and the game is done. There was a bazilion things more I wanted to add (like always) but I am just glad it has at least some level of completion. Tomorrow I’ll try to find the time for a post-mortem.

Cya next time! Looking forward to play those awesome games!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZEZT3GRP

this is a link to both my game and my code.

Posting in case submit didn’t go. bonus time to submit because of load is great. I’ll check back later.
anyway.

use Chrome browser if you can.
html5 / made with construct 2.
link to entry

Sigh… Finished. With few minutes to spare (and a lot of stuff I hadn’t time to do… like any sounds

But in the end it’s better then I thought just few hours ago…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5242

http://www.mageo.cz/home/BIRDMAN/ScreenShot.JPG

Don't let him leave!

This was my first LD. First off I’d like to say that I had a blast. This was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot. Among the things I learned, or realized are:

-Sound is the hardest part of game development. The entire mood of your game is dependent on the aural atmosphere you create. On top of that, loading, mixing, and playing sound is bloody difficult. I used SDL_Mixer, which worked okay. Anybody know a C/C++ sound library that works better? OpenAL?

-SOIL (the Simple Opengl Image-loading Library) is wonderful. It can be made even better with this call when generating textures:

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);

this sets the texture scaling to “jagged”, otherwise known as pixelated. Excellent for retro games. OpenGL has no functionality for color-keying (per-color transparency) from what I have read of the documentation, so I just loaded raw PNG data with SOIL and removed colors manually.

-Premade code is great, or would have been. Between now and December I am going to distill my code from this compo into a slim package I can use for LD22 and beyond. It will be posted, of course.

-Status updates! Not of the facebook variety, but an enum for each class with all the possible states of that class. Easy to program, easy to understand. Speaking of facebook, sequestering myself from the internet for most of the competition was a successful tactic. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

-Change the color scheme! The retro comeback of the last few years has left out palette swapping for the most part, since we have so damned much storage space we can make whatever images we want. It is an easy way to change up the scenery without drawing more stuff, however, so it’s perfect for LD.

Here’s my game, Fortress IX . Check out the game page and give it a whirl if you so desire.

-graham

Demonout – The roguesque adventure

There was a lot I couldn’t do in time, but well, I have a quite playable game in 48 hours. And it’s even fun!

Check this action rpg at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=5184

OK managed to finish with like an hour to spare.

Windows | Source

Four differently colored guys are in a maze and need to get out.

[Controls]

Arrows to Move

1, 2, 3, and 4 to switch control of characters

[Gameplay]

Push four same colored blocks together in 2 by 2 pattern to form a mega block

Then push those together to form the exit square

Windows download only, hope you guys enjoy!