For LD25, I tried using Unity for the first time. Well, that’s not quite true–I had tried using it a few times before, but never got anything done. As a programmer, the seemingly content-oriented interface threw me off, so before LD25 I read a lot of documentation to ensure I knew what Unity is all about.

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To get this settled right off the bat: this LD was great fun, regardless of my troubles. I’m happy to say that I finished the (very much incomplete) game Beyond Our Sacred Sun.

The Beginning

I begin this chronicle with my initial plans. Shortly before the LD, I heard about Google App Engine. I had done a little javascript, css, python… so I thought I’d use it for the LD.

I did some coding, and frankly was amazed at the functionality GAE provided. I had to do some tinkering to set up a Lubuntu VM as a development server (I’m bad at configuring dependencies in Windows), but after that, I was able to continue on a decent pace for a while.

Showstopper

At about 36 hours in (and countless showstopping bugs) I had a decent framework to make my game in. Stars moved in a stellar map, and were synchronized by the server automatically. An event system was apparently functional. “12 hours left–I’ll have to cut down on features, but at least I’ll probably have some gameplay by then! With multiplayer in a persistent world, no less!” Of course, things soon tanked.

At around 36 hours, I hit my first solid, unbudging handicap. I exceeded a GAE server quota: database reads. My code wasn’t efficient (not surprising, it being my first web application) and I had committed some unmentionable sins during solar map generation. If the google servers couldn’t handle development debugging, there was no way they could handle LD traffic.

“…there can be no true despair without hope.”

At the realization that I couldn’t use GAE for my LD game, I frantically scoured the internet for another way to host it. When I found AppScale, I breathed a sigh of relief. But then I saw the downloads page. “Torrents? Well… ok, I guess.” I started it up, and to my dismay found that there weren’t any seeders–only 16 penniless peers. After more searching, I found something promising: a blog post from Wolfire on AppScale. Unfortunately that post was 3 years old.

My development process’ new theme: Abandoned

With that discovery, I took up another of the suggested LD themes and abandoned my project. With only 4 hours left, I decided to replicate some of the basic ideas of my game and make Beyond Our Sacred Sun.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up with a stripped-down Galcon clone.

I’m in. Although I may be out at a moment’s notice. Hopefully not. I don’t have major plans for this weekend, but I’m still in college so anything could pop up.

I’ll probably be using AS3 with Flashdevelop and my personal library of random junk. I might decide to use C++ (with SFML) if it’s more suitable to my idea, or even go the other way and use HTML5 + JS.

Can’t wait to see which theme wins!

It’s spring break, so I’m in! The fact that it’s spring break will probably interfere with my work, but it’s worth a shot.

I started my doodle not really remembering what a doodle is, and made a mockup. I realized that it wasn’t a doodle about halfway through, but thought it might be a better use of time just to keep going.

Behold, a sketch of some basics for codename Minerbot 2.

This LD (like LD20) I decided to make an adventure sort of game. Not an arcade game like I usually make, but something that involves a big space to move around in.

Needless to say, I failed both times. The first time because I tried to write an efficient tile map renderer from scratch, and the second because I got caught up in making my chunked, randomly-generated map work while avoiding floating-point inaccuracies.

So, after a particularly nasty bug involving the doors and still not having collision, I decided to scrap that project about 6 hours before the deadline and make a different one.

This new project, Asteroids: Alone Edition is what happens when you take the theme too literally and apply it to an old game. Simply put, it’s asteroids minus the asteroids. Well, except the main menu, where the AI plays.

I finished it up in about four or five hours, and submitted early.
…Success?

(Most of that time was spent tweaking the AI. Make sure not to ignore it when you play my game!)

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Play my entry, Asteroids: Alone Edition.

Or play the original, unfinished project, Return to Solitude (Controls: WASD, hold shift to run.)

today i found an abandoned apartment complex. thick doors, locks to hard to pick. not problem, likely no food in rooms anyway

lobby had stuff, though:

• 7x water bottle
• 2x polaroid camera (wtf?)
• 5x fritos chili cheese [-1, breakfast]
• 4x potato chips
• 2x snickers
• more ruined in vending machine
• wrench
• !!!screwdriver set!!!

no enemy presence found. maybe in the rooms, but I listened at all the doors and didn’t hear anything. not worth the noise to bash them in either, since i can’t pick the lock

getting cold, got to find a place with windows left. don’t want to have to return to house G. don’t want those memories

i feel so alone

I was curious which theme would win based on the total votes they got in the previous rounds. So I put them in a google doc, sorted them, and guess which came out on top…

KITTENS!

Wait a sec… the numbers… oh. I had it sorted in ascending order.

Unfortunately, it appears that random generation wins based on previous votes, but I hope this prediction turns out to be false.

I like making games that use random generation, but that’s exactly the point. My games already always have random generation, so this theme does nothing for me. If this theme wins, it’ll be a boring contest for me. Secondly, I bet that artists wouldn’t like it much, because random generation is something that you have to code/logicize/whatever. Although I’m sure a few things could be done with art style for random generation, it doesn’t really seem fair in that regard. There is a third reason that essentially disqualifies it, but I won’t mention that, because it’s kind of too late.

I got a message about this from a friend, in fact… maybe it will convince you.

“There are consequences for this evolution of theme voting… alone will randomly generated be the antihero of decay, for only in a parallel universe, in some forgotten place, will the mechanism of my dreams shape-shift into the territory where, upon reflection, the self-replicating fall towards a theme travels in time with me, to the tunnel of the conscious world. Then… then the teleporting moon-kittens strike, their underground movement taking force.”

He has a thing for bolding words. He’s weird.

I always think it’s cool to respond to the comments I get, so here goes. If nothing else, it’s a fun way to talk about my game some without dedicating a ton of time to writing up stuff. I just entered college, so taking less time is a very good thing.

markengley says …
Aug 22, 2011 @ 11:50am
Really good idea. Looks like an optical illusion…

I forget why I originally designed it like this, but… well, it looked even more like an optical illusion before. (Go here and just click the play button. If you have ANY problems whatsoever with flashy lights, don’t do it.)

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Well, over the past few weeks I’ve worked a little on an engine to use for this mini ld. There are still bugs, but I made a little example program with the thing to hopefully help motivate you to enter the mini ld.

Without further ado, here it is, a little sample of what my engine can do.

EDIT: Here’s an updated version!

Hope you enjoy it!

(I’m the31 in IRC, by the way.)

For MiniLD 26, my entry was successfully planned and completed. Usually neither of these things happen.

So, just how finished was Minerbot 2? I’ll go through the checklist that drZool had us make.

• Player ship able to move through the asteroid world. Certainly.
• Collectors can be shot, and attach to walls. They aren’t exactly shot, more “placed”. Still a yes.
• Collectors send beams through ore pockets, mining them. (Just like Minerbot’s collectors did it.) Yep.
• Collectors have to recharge, and have a maximum capacity. Yes, you have to wait for collectors to recharge in your toolbar, but they don’t have maximum capacities. I felt at the time that it wasn’t a very good gameplay choice, so I didn’t implement it.
• Upgrades have effects on their respective stats. They sure do.
• Ore and gems are generated randomly, and when collected add to the commission received. Yep.
• The flow works as shown, with the exception of contracts. Yep.
• There is a way to end the “mining round” to upgrade and select new contracts (if possible). Yep. Although the way I do this will change with future versions.
• Configurable controls for those with weird keyboards. Yeah. It’s in the options menu.

This MiniLD went great, and finally made me start the sequel to Minerbot. There’s still a lot to do before I release the full game, but at least now I have a place to start.

Instead of taking the normal route of making a whole new, original game for this minild, I’m going to make the sequel to Minerbot.

Of course, I’ll be using AS3.

(A) Name of the game: Minerbot 2 (for now)

(B) Description (140 chars): Your job as an employee of AMEC is to mine asteroids. Use tools of the trade to get the job done quickly and after a little profit, upgrade.

(C) Mockup image: Well, I kind of did three, but it’s all in one image. This outlines the basic flow of the game.

(D) Definition of Done:

• Player ship able to move through the asteroid world.
• Collectors can be shot, and attach to walls.
• Collectors send beams through ore pockets, mining them. (Just like Minerbot’s collectors did it.)
• Collectors have to recharge, and have a maximum capacity.
• Upgrades have effects on their respective stats.
• Ore and gems are generated randomly, and when collected add to the commission received.
• The flow works as shown, with the exception of contracts.
• There is a way to end the “mining round” to upgrade and select new contracts (if possible).
• Configurable controls for those with weird keyboards.

There’s more to do to make it a complete game, but if I get those things done by the end of the MiniLD I’ll be happy. Notably missing is anything about contracts–they would take a while to implement and give variety to. Also, the big red bar in the lower-left of the gameplay screen is unused, although it would be for health.

Hopefully my extensive mockup will help me get through the art more quickly.

I started by focusing on the “it’s dangerous to go alone” part of the theme. I thought it would be easier to make a game where you have to make a group than one about taking things. So, I did that. I decided to essentially make a pokemon clone, except more evil.

Then, with a little bit of trying-too-hard-to-be-serious storyline (Phantom Keeper? What?), I put in the “take this” part both ways.

This was a very difficult project to take in 48 hours, because the genre is basically fueled by content and I hadn’t made a game like it before.

In the beginning, I doubted I could finish the game. 48 hours (and 48,000 terrible hacks) later, I find that I was correct to doubt it. I barely got a lot of the core features packed in there, and the game is terribly unbalanced. If I ever find an artist who would want to do a game like this in the future I’ll think about it, but I think Phantom Keeper is done until then.

It was a fun LD, but I’ll be scaling back to a simpler game for the next minild.

Finally, a link to the “finished” game.

I got home from go-karting with my family to see the theme. Didn’t have any ideas beforehand for “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!” but I think I have one now.

First thing I did was lose my script for creating AS3 files for all the png files, mp3 files, etc. in a directory. Second thing I did was rewrite it in Python (as opposed to the Ruby original). So… that was fun.

As for my idea, what’s important are the items the player is given.

Of course, those gloves aren’t ordinary. The rocks aren’t either. Net’s strange too. It’ll become clear in time.

On the right you’ll notice a link to the world map of LD contestants. Awesome.

You’ll notice that the map is really really tiny. Not so awesome.

I decided to make a javascript thing to expand the map. It didn’t quite work, but with some help from JohnColburn, it does now:

Awesome.

I really want to do this LD, but there’s a large possibility that I’ll have too many other commitments to get it done.

That said, if I do go ahead and try it, I’ll be using:

• FlashDevelop
• My basecode: Statework
• Photoshop, or maybe Flash
• sfxr

I look forward to the LD, even if it turns out I’m not able to participate.

I badly, terribly, HORRIBLY finished my game.

A direct link to the .swf.

A link to the competition page.

Good luck!

It’s done! After working on it at an airport, on a plane, and finally at a hotel, I’m posting my game. At first I didn’t think I would have time this weekend to do the MiniLD, but it turns out I had more than enough even while travelling.

(I probably was only able to finish this game because it was incredibly simple, but still.)

You can go here to play 0xC0A57ED on Kongregate.

(Rule-following is as follows:
Year as title: it’s set in year 0xC0A57ED, so far in the future that we use hexadecimal for years.
Spring physics: the movement and connection between you and the squares seems like a spring, even though it isn’t really. Let’s just say they are year 0xC0A57ED hyper-springs.)

I started off by doing some python stuff to make directories with links to each game’s page. So after that, I would just have to download stuff, open the zip, and drag it into the folder. It works well enough. Except it’s really boring.

I got around 2/5 of the compo entries done before stopping. You can get the partial (255MB) file here: ludumdare_torrent_partial.zip

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to download this file, complete the archive, and start it up as a torrent. I’ll help seed.

(If you’re crazy/bored enough to do this, leave a message in the comments so we don’t get two people doing the same work at the same time. Wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s time. )

So, it didn’t go as planned. What Ludum Dare goes as planned, anyway?

Primary problem this time around actually wasn’t time for a change. My basecode was incomplete by the time the competition started, and it stayed incomplete throughout the 48 hours. Halfway through the compo, I realized that I couldn’t even delete my entities from the game world! I almost started working without the entity system from then on, but luckily I was able to hack in a quick fix to the ES code. This constant incompleteness multiplied the time wasted on basic stuff and made is so I couldn’t finish.

What would I do next time? Have working basecode, or none at all. Either would have made me better-prepared for this LD.

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Now I’m trying to make the game what it was supposed to be.

First order of business: get rid of the magic numbers. I have quite a few of these floating around, and I want them exterminated. I might leave 32 around though, just because it’s so obvious. (Tile size.)

Then: Change renderable stuff so that it uses one scene graph each. At the moment I have three entities synchronizing their motions for the player, and this is NOT a good thing. Also, enemies would be much more dynamic after this change.

After that: make the level generation generate maps that actually make sense for where I’m taking this. This includes a safe “start room”, undiggable metal walls, and more clear “rooms”. Then I’ll work on all the other stuff.

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This game has actually been on my mind for months now, and it’s nice to get a forced start on it. Lots of refactoring to be done before I’m happy with it though.

Oh, I don’t think I mentioned this: online cooperative multiplayer is a future possibility, mostly because I’m using entity systems and I don’t think it would be that hard to synchronize state.

(My LD entry is here, for future reference.)