Photon was my entry to LD6. The theme was “Light and darkness”. I still remember all the time I fiddled with shadow calculations. In my game, each light source does exact shadow calculations with all the level geometry – and in order to still have it all run with < 1% CPU, this was quite some work. Now, there’s nothing special about this except, I wanted to do things in the most simple way possible, this being an LD. And I had to admit utter defeat when I later saw bluescrn’s entry. Instead of spending half of the 48 hours on it like me, he went for a dead simple approach – with the only difference that his was not 100% accurate. Which would have made no visual difference in my game whatsoever. In fact his shadow method would have worked a lot better in my game in just about every respect

I still managed to do quite well. Here’s some screenshots from back then:

The title screen.

The goal of the game is to send all the photons coming from the lamp to the prism, but the problem is, you only can see the areas of the map which are lit up by the moving photons.

To control the photons, you can place mirrors – to light up more areas of a level, and once you have found the prism, send them all to it.

Seems the original submission is still up: original zip at original site

Swarm was my entry to LD8. The theme of was, well… “swarm”. I know, I know, I’m no good with coming up with names for my entries. Anyway, for this game, I coded an entire 3D engine (octree based) from scratch. So, I spent most of the 48 hours debugging octree code, and crammed in some gameplay towards the end. Since I never spend more time on gameplay – it still should be as fun to play as most of my games

This is an in-development screenshot, showing some octree debugging going on.

That’s how the game looks like. Shoot down all the pink, eyed balls to encounter the uber-cool-final-boss-with-superior-AI. (I got feedback suggesting that at least one person actually played long enough to encounter the boss – so I consider the gameplay aspect successful.)

Here’s a mirror of the original submission: Swarm

Hydra was my entry to LD7. The theme was “growth”. It’s a top-down shooter, where you play a growing hydra.

At the start, the hydra is merely a small worm – and even a single knight who has set out to kill you is a dangerous foe.

Some levels later and after eating lots of knights, the Hydra has reached quite some size. But, there’s now also more knights, and they also got bigger and stronger.

The final form when you win the game – I doubt anyone ever has encountered this without using cheat codes.

Download: original LD7 submission (no idea if it still works on modern systems)

Battery was my entry to LD9. The theme was “Build the level you play”. Initially, the open voting hinted at a clear winner of the theme “battery”, for which Hamumu found the best explanation: Battery is a place where bats are hatched. Now, when I woke up the morning of the LD, first thing was I checked the theme, and it mysteriously had shifted. So, I decided to make an RTS where you start with nothing, then have to build up the battery you play.

The title screen.

An in-game shot. Basically, you can order bats to dig (build the level you play), and in the new cave room build different structures for hatching worker and soldier bats and providing food to them. At fixed intervals, a wave of most horrific enemies will attack the battery – so you better have enough soldiers by then.

Insanity was my entry to LD4. The topic was “infection”. My idea was somewhat far-fetched and only in the story – the home town of Ian the janitor is befallen by an infection of insanity – so he has to beat up all the scientists at his workplace to find the cause of the infection and a cure.

Since I messed up the base engine (tried to somehow stuff the 3D into 2D), I wasn’t able to finish. There’s just one level with place holder graphics, but the level can’t be won and so the story never reaches its conclusion.

Gnome Guard was my entry to LD1 – theme guardian. In the game, you are confronted with a horde of small gnome children, and have to safely guard them home after school.

The title screen

The gnomes will run towards the green pillar, and avoid the red pillar.

But only if they feel like it.

The original download is mirrored here – no idea if the game itself still works: download link