I’ve started work on the October Challenge. I will be using my game from LD21 entitled Viral. My goal will be to release my Flash game on portal sites and earn my $1 through ad revenue.

Unfortunately, I’ve got a massive amount of work to do to have the game ready for a proper release. More than I originally had thought I had needed to do.

A quick todo list off the top of my head:

• Refactor huge chunks of the original code, replace hacks with real code, fix the huge bugs in my LD21 release
• Replace the poor art in the LD21 version with polished art
• Compose a song that is longer than 2 bars
• Add more gameplay in terms of miniature objectives to do while avoiding the monsters chasing you.
• Add in a winning condition for a level
• Add more levels
• Polish the game!
• Tie portal specific API to increase re-playability and allow easy access to persistent stats.

The art will be a bit of a challenge; I’m not the greatest artist in the world. I have dabbled in pixel art in the past, but not to the level that I’ll be working on. The music will take a significantly non-trivial amount of time as well.

Hey! I’ve decided to start a diary on my blog (which is, by the way, just a cool name for some boring blog posts). Nah, just kidding. Someone could find them interesting . I’ll write diary pages regulary about the development (drawing, programming, marketing, etc.) and how everything goes. There will be fresh screenshots and videos with each post so it’s worth following if you like what you see below. Regards!

Image from the Diary

Hi World,

My nickname is P3(Pirate Cat)! I’m programming my first game in Java.  I have been working with Java for about 3 months. I program in many other languages too. I have been programming for about 4 years. Sad I have never made a game. I’m right now reading Killer Game Programming in Java. If anyone knows of good java game programming books, videos, or websites, please leave a reply were I can find it!

wish me luck!

P3,

Heya, I’ll be doing the Challenge as well!

Since I don’t want to spend my time writing, I’m going to just talk to myself on video.  I’ll post them here and at my website so you can join the fun.  Here’s the first one! 

Well i have always wondered why more people have not done this.

with the XNA framework It has been made fairly easy to do a release on three platforms all at once.

Phone, XBOX , Windows.

there is even a marketplace for two of the platforms.

with IndieCity launching there is now a market place for the Windows Version.

Well as of now i have almost no Game so it is going to be incredibly tough to complete this but i will work hard on this

I will target Xbox / Windows First and see what time remains for the phone version..

www.yakyb.wordpress.com

Will be doing a Sand Castle Tower Defense Game for Android.

Well, I spent the last day or 2 thinking of ideas and have come up with the idea of a combination of Lemmings and a tower defence with the tower floor idea of Tiny Tower with the art style of the old Apogee games of the MSDos era .

You can place a finite number of friendly bots which stop enemy bots in their tracks. You require to stop the enemies for a few seconds to drain their battery and cause them to die. Strategy of placement will be key as there will be multiple floors in a tower and you have limited friendly bots.

Would really appreciate feedback, cheers

Here is my first design drawing :

indie(Magazine); Issue #16 was just released, and here’s what’s in the issue:

• Interview with Tululoo creator SilentWorks
• Tileset tutorial by Maple
• Game Reviews

And there’s still more!

Read it! 

Also, read indie(Magazine); Issue #15, which is chalk full of Ludum Dare #15 content!

After writing my last entry, I found a tickle in my throat that turned into the flu and limited my time in front of the computer. I managed to do a couple things yesterday, like add running and crouching, with the different speeds and jumping abilities. This morning I made some minor modifications to allow stretching of the ‘moving’ platform. Baby steps.

My first major goal is to complete the player’s abilities. The sooner I can finish that, the sooner I can tweak things as I test. Today I want to make the built-in player abilities like double jump and wall jump toggle-able, as the first step to making them dependent on equipping an item. New abilities will of course open up new areas of the world.

I believe I have some issues with the lighting in regards to framerate. I may need to optimize my lighting code. This leads into another player ability, the lantern or flashlight, that I would also like to complete today.

I have been waiting for an excuse to finish a jam game that I made at this years No More Sweden Game Jam. Back then it was called Tap Tap RTS I couldn’t come up with a name ). It’s a super simple and quite colorful one button Rock, Paper, Scissors inspired RTS game for two players. You can play it here: http://timgarbos.dk/TTRTS/ but to be honest, it got horrible instructions, the core mechanics are broken, and you probably wouldn’t get it   However, I believe that it do have some potential

It lookse like this:

A month ago or so I spend an evening on rewriteing the core gameplay to work as intended. I also changed the art style and symbolics to something a little more fitting: the units are now Rock, Paper, and Scissors instead of box, triangle, and cirlce. I came up with the working title Hep Hap Hup, it is not really playable yet.

It is made in Unity and I haven’t decided if I should do a Kongregate version or an AppStore release. Any other ideas?

I got a blog too.

http://folischallenge.tumblr.com/ <- That one

I'll update there, and maybe twice per week here.

That's it.

I’m going to make a decent attempt at this, I have this idea I’ve been “tinkering” with for a while now, and would like to actually finish it (For once ).

Most of my updates will be posted on my blog, but I’ll post weekly snapshots over here as well.

As it currently stands, I’m currently playing around with the concept of an editor where players can (eventually) drag and drop components onto units.

The next step is to allow new components to be placed onto “mount points” that units have.

And finally, some (programmer) eye candy

(It’s some concepts that I’ve got for a set that will focus primarily on allowing customisation by attaching attachments onto other parts, and so on (An attachment on an attachment, on an attachment?))

Hey folks… This is me throwing down the gauntlet on the october challenge. I did it last year, and made some good money, so why not do another round and see what I can come up with.

I have been working on a sequel to the project that I did last year, but not that hard. This year, I am doing a brainfuck interpreter for iphone, with 2 new opcodes that allow for waiting for a timing sync and playing a note on a synthesizer. I got the interpreter working pretty quick, and did a crappy interface for it and a really basic synth back in june. You can see a video of that version of it here. After I finished that, I realized that it would need a ton more work and shelved it while my real job took off.

I came back to it yesterday, and overhauled the graphics engine with a nice new sheen of vectory goodness:

I also started work on expanding it from a single interpreter, to 8 interpreters so that you can get a few different instances running at once with different synthesizers. I don’t really want to spend too long on this project, but I think I can jam out the synths in a day or two, and then get the file loading working, and that should be good!

I should mention that this is not a game, more of a music app, but that is where my skills lie, and I think this is closer to completion than any of the games that I did this year. Also I think that it is a bit easier to stand out in the music market than it is in the game market, so that is where I am going.

Vote and create the best Ludum Dare Apps on the Ludum Dare App List. Think of what weird app that Darers would use. What would be cool to have? What would be an instant must use? I’ll post about the technical details of how to make Apps work in the future.

Examples:

Make an iOS app 

What does the app do? A better version would be: Follow votes on a LD entry on a phone

Broadcast LD status updates through any medium

People have no idea what medium means. A better version would be: Broadcast LD status updates through any medium, including irc, rss, and twitter

Discover Commercial LD Games

This is not sentence capitalization. A better version would be: Discover commercial LD games

For the October challenge I’ll be finishing an iOS game I started last month titled “Haunted Hallway”. It’s a 2.5D platformer with an infinite procedurally generated level. The goal is to last as long as you can running from the spooky ghost wall of doom. It’s Halloween themed so I’m hoping to have it release a week or two before the 31st. I feel like I’m cheating ’cause I’m almost done with it, but if there’s enough time at the end of the month I might make a second game real quickly like for the challenge.

Here’s a screenshot of the iPad version:

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the October Challenge this year. I wanted to join in on the fun last year, but I was way too busy back then. But I’m hoping nothing is getting in the way this year. Also, as of today I’m a full-time indie developer.

Before I get into what my game is all about, here is some back-story: I’ve grown up with strategy and simulation games like Sim City, Caesar or The Settlers and they have been and still are my favorite game genre. What I want to create is a peaceful strategy game which is not too complex for newbies, but not too simple for veterans. I had several prototypes in mind with different gameplay mechanics and what I settled on was a scenario in where the player has to build a settlement on sky islands.

Interestingly enough, I came up with the original sky island idea for LD #20 and after playing around with the idea for a bit, I decided to create a small prototype while I was at BIGJAM in Berlin. While I was not as productive as I hoped to be, I got the basics done and decided to stick with the prototype. All in all, I worked about three weeks on this game so far. If you want to know what happened so far development-wise, click here to be redirected to the development blog.

If you liked the screenshot, I uploaded a very short gameplay video to Youtube last month if are interested in how the game looks like in motion. I also want to mention that I’m not working alone on this: Christian Storcks is doing the music (a short preview of that is in the video I linked in the last sentence) and Jesse, a friend of mine, is helping me with some coding, in particular scripting and some backend stuff.

The game is going to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I am planning on starting pre-orders by October 21st and I hope someone will buy the game.

This month I’ll be working on a platformer with lots of powerups and vehicles where you have to try to take over the world.

Game engine progress:

• Platforms
• Characters
• Blocks
• Interactivity
• Powerups

Small gfx teaser for my October Challenge project Courier of the Crypts (CotC) . Yeah, main element (lighting) is missing here but what I want to show are the new tiles. Do you like ‘em? Yes, no? I want to hear more

Soon, I’ll post game feautres and differences between old (LD#20 version) and new, upcoming one so stay tuned!

Thanks everyone for your generous contributions! It’s awesome seeing the community come together to help keep this site afloat! The FUNdraiser is now over, so may your year be filled with many 48-hour game jams!

The donation system is still available if you really want to contribute more. At this point our hosting should be covered for over a year, so contributions above and beyond will be used at the organizers discretion. (I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of giraffes …) But really, we’ll probably keep a hefty buffer in case our hosting costs go up again After the optimization we did to the site, though, I’m hoping our costs will stay under control.

I just want to say a thanks again, this has been an awesome year for Ludum Dare and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012!

-Phil
P.S. a special thanks to PoV (Mike Kasprzak) for setting up the donation system! It worked great!