I just couldn’t finish in time. Even if I worked through the rest of this night –  I just wouldn’t be able to pull it off. The scale of my game was too big I guess. So I pretty much failed – still, I am planning to finish this in the next few days – but I wasn’t able to fit it in 48h.

The game is called Shroud. In it you control an old man awakening at his campsite in the middle of a foggy forest. In search of his fellow travellers he gets lost between the trees. Behind the fog there’s something watching and waiting.

Anyway here’s a small preview of what I got this far:

Good luck to the rest and congrats to those who already finished =)
And off to bed I go… until next time!

So I’ve been working on a game where you’re walking around in the dark with creepy things that can hear you, and know you’re there.  And will chase you around screaming.  I started with the idea that horror is about the anticipation and avoiding the scary things.  I’m not sure how that’s going so far. 

It’s nearly 48h since I started, and the core is done, but I’m missing important parts of the game.  It isn’t really playable at this point.  On top of that, I’m feeling super awful like I’m coming down with something.  I probably need to go to sleep.  If I feel better tomorrow, I’ll take advantage of the MiniLD “or whatever” schedule and finish this up.  I’d really like to actually submit something…

Well here is what I have: A first person maze using opengl.

The objective is to find a key and then the exit. Meanwhile, an axe-wielding man will be chasing you.

It’s carpets! It’s madness!!

LINK

And so I’m done… I’m kinda happy with the result,  I managed to finish all I planned (which is  first time  for me). This time I’ve concentrated more on the atmosphere and less on the coding… although I spent about half a day writing one stupid program for map generation… If it went faster, I could have more levels and/or content…

Kudos for everyone who’ll guess how I got the  idea for the  ”blinkers”  :)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-29/?action=preview&uid=5242

I finally finished Sleeping dogs lie!

Try it out, and let me know what you think!

Timelapse is here

Horror, that is. Creating a feeling of suspense, dread and perhaps unpleasantness.

In my game you have to find 3 artefacts to open the door to the outside. You move in darkness, carrying a small lamp. Lanterns light up when you reach them and are save havens, where you cannot be attacked by the monsters, which chase you once you come to close to them.

I like the idea of the light-element, which not only helps you see, but also repells the monsters. Unfortunately, this game needs way to much polishing to be in an acceptable state.

I still learned some interesting things though , and will put this in the “prototype”-folder.

I’m looking forward to playing the other games, and seeing their takes on the genre.

-Matthew

Trace_Dump

MOAR PROGRESS YAY!

All the game logic is finished (as you can see from the beautiful trace dump screenshot), now it’s time to give feedback to the player, add graphics and finally sound

The only thing i’m lacking is an XML parser for the text, but I can put the current short story in there without much hassle, yet it would be neat to make the code reutilizable so I’ll leave that for later.

I started on something, but it wasn’t going anywhere, and I ended up getting sucked back to my older project, which is driving me mental and I want to get finished asap. Might give another try on tuesday : P

Look forward to playing all of the other entries tomorrowwww (and throughout the week as they may come in).

(also, big thanks to whoever modified the sticky post to link to submission stuff : D . I LOVE YOU MY SECRET ASSISTANT )

The game didn’t come out too good since we ran out of time, but expect better results next time!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-29/?action=preview&uid=6685

indie(Magazine); Issue #15 was just released, and it’s 90% about Ludum Dare!

Inside the issue:

• LD#21 Wrap-Up article
• Top 3 reviews (compo and jam)
• Interviews with the makers
• Post-mortems

And there’s still more!

Read it!

Second (pre)release, and there is now a level 2, and the cutscene moves automatically (before you needed to hit enter, but I forgot to tell people that!)

New version has been uploaded, I hope you guys like it!

collected 11 diamonds and could escape from the prison

Idea

My ld21 entry urth scored high in innovation (4th) but not so well in everything else, and worst of all in graphics (267th). The general goal was to improve on that, while still keeping to 48 hours only.

Theme

I’ve made this to fit 5 jams, namely:

- miniLD 29 – horror
- GPCv8 (Game Prototype Challenge) – armor & pollination
- Mysticism Pageant (Super Friendship Club) – mysticism
- Story Game (Experimental Gameplay Project)
- Music Interpretation Contest (GameJolt)

Most of the themes are reflected by story rather than gameplay, which can be rather confusing as the story isn’t obvious from the beginning, and takes quite a bit of playing to sort out.

What worked

I’ve never finished a platformer before, any my closest attempt was a worms clone 6 or 7 years ago which I lost due to a HDD failure. As a general rule I’m not very fond of platformers in general, but I wanted to walk a mile in the other man’s shoes before criticising him (after all, if it went badly I’d be a mile away and have his shoes). The good news is that I now have reusable code (sort of) which I can indeed reuse should I chose to make more platformers.

Similarly, I’ve only done 2d frame by frame animation once or at most twice before, so I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to pull that off in so little time.

I’ve tried to add a sense of anticipation to the presence of the red eyes. I’m not sure how obvious the effect is, but the light intensity fades and movement becomes blurred as redeyes approach. The intent was to provide a subtle hint which would be picked up subconsciously and trigger an undefined sense of discomfort.

I’ve also discovered workarounds to some problems I’ve had before. Behind the scenes stuff.

What didn’t work

3D failed me once more. I wanted a 2D platformer with 3D scenery, but I ended up with a 2D platformer with 2Dscenery rendered in 3D. Problems ranged from the mesh not fitting properly, to blender not saving texture information to obj files and to unnatural slowdowns in rendering. Maybe next time.

I intended to have a background consisting of sliding panels which were to give a sense of depth. Mountains, plants that sort of thing. I noticed that I wasted too much time on that with no respectable results and decided to abandon it. It’s probably better that I did.

Sounds were also supposed to change as red eyes approach, heavy breathing was supposed to take place in darkness, but the sounds would get cut out. I rarely work with sounds so I need to look into that. Good thing lmms saved the day with some handy effects.

The death screens have a slight screamer effect which I dislike, so I tried to fade them in to smooth transition. They are intended to look disturbing and not intended not to shock. I’m not sure if I succeded.

My laptop (brandishing the cursed gma 500) apparently runs the game at half the speed. Since playtesting was done on that, the end result might be a bit too fast. I need feedback on that. In addition I had to change renderers in the last minute as there seems to be an issue with processing and openGL applets.

Fun was had.

Feedback, positive and negative is equally welcome.

Game page | Play directly

So, Cosmic Heist was my entry for the recent Ludum Dare compo. It was a major success by my reckoning, as it was completed in time. That aside, however, I would like to write a little about how things went.

What went right

I spent some time coming up with a couple of interesting(ish) ideas, but ended up throwing them out before settling on what became Cosmic Heist. When I designed the game that actually ended up being made, I actually cut out tons of things, and cut even more as I developed it. This is one area that I really want to improve (I, like many others, am horrible at the “cutting things until it’s right” part), and I feel I made some good progress during this compo. I was able to reject tons of ideas, some good, some bad, but all non-essential.

I had a decent personal code base to start from, and already knew all about the language, libraries, and tools I used beforehand, so I was able to jump right in.

I left some time for play-testing and bug fixing/tweaking near the end, but ended up not needing very much of it. The game was small and simple enough that it wasn’t too buggy by the end, and my wife and I tested it some as I worked on it anyway. However, I would definitely leave this buffer time again anyway, because it really kept things stress-free.

The menus ended up looking/working/sounding great, and I added a cool animated menu background near the end that I really liked. I’ll probably use some of the work that went into that stuff off into the future in other projects.

The music turned out to not suck as much as I thought it would. That was actually my highest-scoring area in the competition, and I am still somewhat unsure what to make of that. This was my first time really making any music, and I don’t really have experience playing/reading/etc. music either. But it doesn’t sound too bad, so I am counting that as a nice success.

The controls are really fluid, and are my favorite part of the whole thing by far. The way you control the ship is great, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I actually didn’t spend much time tweaking that, and by implementing everything I needed for it, I had a whole system for various enemy ship movements, too.

What went wrong

The player’s ship is a bit oddly shaped. This makes it hard to see where you are going. I didn’t realize this at all (duh! isn’t it obvious! the ship points in the direction I drew it to point!) until people began commenting on it. Certainly something that would need to be fixed.

Some people kept looking for the shoot button. I didn’t make it very obvious (at all) that there is no shooting in the game. You just pilot your ship, and enemy ships try to plow into you.

There were a couple of features I wanted to get in, but had to cut due to time constraints. I wanted enemy ships to shoot at you, and every level was supposed to start at a shipyard, from which you had just stolen a ship.

There might be a problem with the Linux build of the game, as one person mentioned they couldn’t get it to run. Unfortunately, it runs fine for me, but I only have two machines to test it on, and they are both almost identical in both hardware and software. If anyone has or can test the game on Linux and tell me if it a) explodes, b)doesn’t run at all, or c) runs fine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Conclusion

All in all, as I said, I was very pleased with the outcome, and I even got some people to play my game, so that was really exciting. I hadn’t ever participated or followed LD until now, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I honestly didn’t think anyone would even see my game! Thanks to everyone who rated mine. One thing that I regret is that I didn’t have time to rate any games myself. I did play a few, and they were all great. Next time, I want to set aside some time to rate a good number of games.

Links

Ludum Dare entry

Cosmic Heist on Cheese and Bacon (my website)

Cosmic Heist on Google Project Hosting (MIT License)

I’ve submitted it but it doesn’t show up and the form is gone.. I’m assuming it’s a bug.

Anyway, while I sleep collect my thoughts for a better, fancier post with words in it that people will understand, you can play ‘Redeye’ here:

PLAY REDEYE

Hi all, please check out my beta version of my new game and plz report any issues. You can find the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-29/?action=preview&uid=6681

Time Lapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs8fD9-27mw

I began writing the novel a few days earlier, maybe I should start typing,
I'm about to finish...

The night is turning to day, but I can't place the words on the typewriter,
so I get up from the desk, then walk to the window to lit a cigarette...
and right there and then the break of dawn.

I know this sounds like some old, worn and tired Cat Stevens song, but maybe,
somehow, this is the right inspiration.

Did you ever wake up to find things changed, a day like every other day,
yet the dawn breaks at a slightly different angle, forever changing your
notion of time?

This is the intro to my game, I feel like I've got a terrific story going, yet I do not
have a clue how to make something like "Typing of the Dead" in Flixel.

I got to be able to turn the story strings into an array, then check if the player has typed
the proper key, but for that I need to check the array and asign to each string to a
FlashEvent.keyCode or something like that.

Does anyone have an idea on how to do this?

I technically have a game.

http://www.thecatsweb.com/AllAreInvited/

I need to do the artwork and add sound effects and generally make it scarier.

Night all!

Susan

I got a first version done, with a first level, I think that’s it for tonight!

Check it out here!

Let me know of any issues please!

If only I knew when I stopped being productive. Anyway – at least there’s something to show in the ol’ graphics department – again trying around with some color effects.

So this is the “game” thus far… I wanted to set my game during the day – heavily relying on fog (much like SIlent Hill I think).

I am wondering how such (<-) a color style can contribute to the feel / perception of horror and whether this is gonna be a horror game after all. It sure doesn’t look like it yet, although I considered the theme rather carefully I probably didn’t spend enough time on preproduction. This very much looks like an experiment – I hope I can finish and am eager to find out about it’s results.

Good night for now!