I thought I wouldn’t make it but I did. With 4 days to spare, no less.

Deface is a free game; my goal was/is to make the $1 from ad revenue.

Here is the submission page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2011/?action=preview&uid=5267

And here is a link directly to it’s home on Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Jacic/deface

I’m here with the fourth dev video preview from the Courier of the Crypts but that’s not all. I’m out of the October Challenge, time run out and I still have lots of things to do. But OC is not just about the October but about finishing a game and earning a single buck from the stuff we love to do – making games. It’s all about to see what is it like to have final polished product out in the world. It’s not the end for me here, I’ll finish Courier of the Crypts, October Challenge game all the motivation I need so it’s still WIN situation.

Now, enough malarkey and let me show you the preview that is featuring 2 types of monsters, GUI (wip), and Flame’o'metter (look at the gui). I hope you like it

Congratiulations to those who succeeded! Others that are like me, don’t give up folks

The team decided, after serval problems with StencylWorks to change to Construct 2 (for the moment), and also to leave the October Challenge, as we lost too much time with facing problems. BUT the project continues! If you want to try a demo-walkthrough of the game with the old Engine:

http://deathofradus.blogspot.com/2011/10/stencylworks-demo.html

Dont forget to follow development news and announcements on facebook and Blogger.

Any advice for the game engine is welcome!

Haven’t given up yet, and there are a few days left!

However, SMART says my secondary harddrive might die any moment now. I do not need this now! New drive ordered, and making extra backups to external drive, hoping that the old drive will last until the new one arrives.

David

Just Entered Cancer Wars into the October Challenge!

Please play it and let me know what you think, because all ad revenue goes to Cancer Research UK!

So .. some fun stuff here!

I’ve added a level selector to my editor so I can start working on multiple levels in my game:

I’ve added zoom in / out into my editor so I can get the big picture of my layouts:

And I’ve added shadows to my characters so it looks nicer:

Not entirely sure if I’ll make the Oct.31 deadline, but I’m making quite a bit of progress. I’ll keep plodding along and see where I’m at in a few days!

-Phil

…but I will not despair. This challenge has showed me what it takes to make a game, both the fun and the frustrating parts, and I finally have something that I can turn into a real game. I am motivated to make this game the best I possibly can, and I will release, but the October deadline is simply too close. I’ve created a story, characters, a general theme, and have decided on a title, “A Fey Mood”. I-I’m going to post my progress so far here, and I’m going to set a new deadline for myself (as without one, I will never release).

This is an automatically updating link to my progress (at least that which I wish to make public).

My new deadline will be Christmas. I hope to see you all then!

It’s not been easy, but the CW:P is out

Check out the game site for more info, try the game at Kongregate. It is made in Flash, so I’ve been able (after a bit of struggling) to roll out desktop installers for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

No sales so far, but it’s my first finished and commercially released game – a little personal dream becoming reality. Many thanks to my sweetheart for support and all the inspirative folks here, at TIGS forums and Flixel forums.

Good luck to all other fellow October Challengers!

A few notes on Adobe AIR
It has been my first desktop app made in Flash, a lot of new things for me:
1) Flash does not allow key controls in fullscreen mode, only AIR in desktop mode does
2) to create a native desktop installer, you have to build it using an AIR SDK on a target platform (luckily I have access to all three major platform systems) – to make a Win installer, you need to build it using a Windows SDK on Windows, etc.

Well, I’m still alive and… hacking! But time is running up, and I need to get back to work, so I’ll just link to the small blog post I just wrote over at Indie DB for now.

David

The ghastly death of Radus is a game for the October Challenge.

We are two to work on this project: me, the “artist-designer”, and my friend the “programmer-designer”. We are actually in High School, and we already worked together on games like Braudu. It is our first Ludum Dare participation.

This game will transcribe the life, or the death should I say, of Radus, a mentally ill person living his last moments of paranoia, which are horrible.

We will use StencylWorks to achieve it. I do not know where to sell it though, for the moment.

Dev Blog: The ghastly death of Radus

Facebook page: The ghastly death of Radus Facebook page !

I posted about how we arrived at ski camp yesterday, and I forgot one important thing to tell you : Why isn’t the game available yet somewhere ?

That’s indeed a very good question ! The reason is quite simple : I’m a little perfectionnist (that’s an euphemism) and I couldn’t just upload a version where there is still some tweaking to do before I find it entirely playable : mainly the difficulty progression has to be changed a little bit, but some other missing details as a “pause” button are not included as it was only one day of development. And finally this is a very special ludum dare challenge: the october challenge ! It’s not one weekend but a full month to release a game and earn One dollar with it (I’m not sure how exactly I can do that without releasing the game though ). In this particular case, we started last saturday evening and I think this game deserve a little more time before any release, but that will happen, I’ll make sure of that.
If I can have some opinion from the video and description above, that’s a plus, and I could even include some of your thoughts or remarks in the game, that is if it’s possible mainly, not only if I’m willing to do it.

Thanks to have read this so far  !

I didn’t report much since the last video preview but there was progress. Among other stuff, I implemented the first enemy that will lurk around the cripts. Horde of ‘em… For more updates on the Courier of the Crypts, read freshly written page 8 from my diary.

Next to that I’m afraid I won’t succeed in the October Challenge 2011 because I don’t want to rush with the development since there are still few features to add and I shouldn’t mention all the work around the main menu and maps that awaits for me.

Soon, on 30th of October, our clocks will shift from 02:59:59 a.m. to 02:00:00 a.m. so there’s actually 1 hour between 2:00 am and 2:00 am.

This is the best time in the year to make a game! Make a game in zero hours!

Fixed website, added submission form, FAQ, theme suggestions and all that! Go check it out!

PS. refresh cache! (Ctrl+F5)

EDIT:
I hacked together a tiny website that tracks tweets.
http://0hgame.eu/

Woohoo! Yesterday the game was submitted to the AppStore  Let’s see what happens!

Here’s the description and screenshots that I submitted!

Icon:

Description:

I shout it on twitter : last weekend we did a game jam, and it was about time ! In a room full of boxes and a temperature a little too low to stay in it all night, we were two with our computers, and the third one was reachable at home on saturday afternoon. We didn’t know what we could do in 48 hours, and by the end of the day, we had more questions than ever, but we produced something not so small, and if you care enough to read, you’ll see pictures and the first video of the “Wildrose at Ski Camp” game.

No fun, no game - the idea

Saturday noon : all computers are installed and we just ate our first pizza (jam food !) : a hard and late start, but let’s begin ! We took the theme of the september Ludum Dare as we couldn’t participate last month and the october challenge has no theme : the october challenge is “make a game and earn 1 dollar with it”. Quite a challenge, but not restrictive about the game scenario : there’s more fun when there’s a constraint ! I won’t describe the whole afternoon but here’s the thing : at 5:30PM we had two prototypes made from the two main ideas that we came up with. Even if we did our share of paper design and brainstorming at the beginning, we needed those prototypes to face the actual fact : these are NOT FUN. Hell that’s a hard lesson to learn during the jam, but you can’t finish a game jam if the game you create is no fun. Without a good idea by the end of the afternoon, we almost thought the jam was compromised. But fortunately for us, our third team player would be reachable one hour later, and he would save the day !

The opposite of a tower defense – game type

A quick phone call and a few minutes later, three new detailed ideas were in competition. We discussed each of them and voted for our favorite : it came up from the “opposite” theme and another game that was a tower defense one, the idea is the following : what if the player does not build towers to defend its house but controls the incoming characters and must reach the house ? A tower attack ! After deciding also what characters we wanted on this game, what kind of environment, we started to explore the possibilities in this kind of game. We wanted to add a lot of features, tons of actions for the player, animation and cartoons every where, but it was saturday night, and there were only a day left ! So we decided to take the most important ones to have an actual game, and started to work on it.

Does it matter if it’s cold in the room ? – environment

I don’t know if this is a parameter, but the room was a little hotter the second day and we produced more stuff that day. And I can say more about that, talking about the landscape style of “Wildrose at ski camp” : it wasn’t the first idea but we went from a city landscape to a mountain landscape : does the temperature in the room influenced that ? I’m glad we came out with it : the game looks definitively cool (!) and is quite corresponding to the weather right now, and by the way, I like skiing (ok, that’s not even relative to the topic).

Let’s share the title – story

Aside from the game jam, the three of us are developing another game not released yet. It takes place within the little riding hood universe, her granny would be named Wildrose. I will share more of this game later on, but let’s focus on this jam game : the goal is to allow the wolves to bring flour bags to the grand mother Wildrose so she can cook pies. The player is able to do that by acting on the wolves snowboarding : stop them, make them move again or double their speed. Once beyond the ski-lift, they are safe and can throw the bag to the grand mother chalet, where Wildrose is cooking. So the title is simply taken from that : “Wildrose takes her vacation in the Alpes”.. well, let’s shorten that : “Wildrose at ski camp”, that’s better.

The return of the game type

We ended up on sunday evening, around 11PM, with a game that got a title screen and a playable game level that is also replayable as parameters change over time to increase the difficulty. Let’s take a break and watch what we got : a game that is FUN to play, so can we send it now ? Well… it’s not really a game jam that takes place on the weekend, so maybe if we could tweak a little bit more, add some features, it would be good ? The first question is : the gameplay has got somehow a feeling of a “déja vu”, but is it enough not to send it ?

The first video ever

Here’s the video of the actual gameplay, please tell us what you think from this video !

Wildrose at Ski Camp – YouTube

Okay it’s not actually my first game.  It’s the first 1-day prototype that I will turn into a single month game come January.

Not really October Challenge worthy but who knows it’s still October.

Wallball

Keep in mind is not really what you’d call a release-worthy game.  It’s just the bare minimum I needed to call the 1-day prototype finished.  The code is going to have to be severely refactored.  I’m going to have to add something in that will make it more gamey or something.  Obviously will need polish, high scores, etc and so forth.

ran into some major snares this past week.  Our animation system was all sorts of wonky… and unfortunately too many hours were spent trying to fix it.  However, as we’ve committed ourselves to the Ludum Dare October Challenge, we’re going to take another step “back” in order to speed up development time.  Our top developers are experienced with the XNA platform, so we decided to use XNA 4.0 in order to side-step our model and animation loading issues.   While we are not proud of this, our code monkeys already have an XNA engine up and running, including 3D sound, animation, and custom shaders.  So, all things considered, yay for XNA!

We’ve made some progress on our art assets as well.  We have two musical scores written, one for in-game and one for the menu.  We have our blob-man model fully animated, and (using previous game code) randomly generated planets for our blob man to run around on.  Finally, we’ve got this awesome logo for Splat!

As Halloween ticks ever closer, we wish everyone the best of luck!  The OPifex team is certainly going to need it this week

I just added Haunted Hallway on to Kongregate, you can check it out here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Uncade/haunted-hallway

So, there was quite a bit of call for a revamped version of my Ludum Dare 21 game, with added music and other aesthetic goodies (and a bit more balancing & grammar checking)

So, yeah, it’s up on Kongregate, remade in stencyl, if you fancy wasting 10 minutes.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Mimicwing/tip-of-the-tongue

Does anyone have a list of places where we can announce our games?

What game websites can we announce on?

How about blogs?  Are there any game blogs that take submissions?

Are there any forums that like to hear about new games being released?

How about PAD file distribution?  I remember this was something useful to do years ago(2003 or so), but is it still worth doing?

Are press releases worth doing?

Places to announce games in the comments.  <– Please leave places to announce in the comments.