Ok so I decided to try to make a game with a person as the main character as opposed to a boat or a circle. My problem is that people walk and stuff. This is hard to make.

My walkcycle looks like a jump cycle

Submission page is here. It’s a shootemup in which you can commandeer the enemy ships.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=rate&uid=1168

It'd be easier to just steal the big ship, silly player

This was fun. My game isn’t very finished, as a bunch of the little features and polish are missing, AI is boring, there is very little variety in ships, and the ship spawn waves are on loop. Also, I never got around to making the pretty laser do damage, and a useless weapon isn’t much good so it’s removed from the ships. I’ll probably do some of these things later, and then get lazy and not properly finish the game. However, it is playable in it’s current state.

I think I may be abusing flash's glow filter

You can play what I have so far  if you want, though it’s still really rough. Both units autoshoot and turn towards the mouse.

So I hate physics engines and I want engines to apply an impulse to the ship that both pushes and turns it. I made up a bit of physics that sort of makes sense to me and I’m ok with the result.

I tried to put an interactive flash thing in this post, but it disappeared when I hit publish.

Am I doing something wrong?

(more…)

I like this trend.

Not very many, I know.

Yup. The time when 100 people make declarations of their intent that very few people read. So here’s mine:

This’ll be my third ludum dare, using the Love engine previously but I’ve recently taken to FlashDevelop. No flixel, since I’ve little ot no experience with it. My plan is to try to make a unique game in a day or so and then spend the rest of the time working on levels, art, and self recorded sound effects.

FlashDevelop for code

Paint.net or SketchBook for art depending on whether or not I go for a handdrawn style

audacity for recording, sfxr is boring

Ok, so ludumdare 17 was forever ago, whatever.

Ages ago I started a postcompo version of my game but then became busy and put it off and forgot about it. I’ve just picked it up again and done some work on it such that I am happy enough with it.

As well as a bunch of bugfixes and minor tweaks, changes include:

Healing over time when near a friendly building. Visual improvements and shore rendering. Improved mapmaker  ensures that players are a minimum distance apart, and that no cities are stuck inland. Victory / Defeat messages. Fire varying in size according to how much damage the unit has taken and the size of the unit.

So no, nothing super different, but enough to make it better.

It looks like this

Download it: (Windows, 1.8MB)

Well, it’s been a week.

This was my second ludum dare, and it was fun. I took a much more ambitious game design this time than I did for my first one, and it made things interesting in I think a good way. Although there are loads of ideas and features that I never got around to implementing, my game is playable and looks a lot better than I expected it to.

The good:

I made an RTS in 48 hours. Also, it’s kind of fun.

The random island generation looks cool and saved me the time to create a map editor and a bunch of interesting maps.

The AI is actually pretty cool. All of the “essential” features are in (fire, selection, training, movement, pathfinding, combat, fire).

The art actually looks pretty neat. I had images for all of the units, particle effects for the fire, circles for the ripple effect that doesn’t entirely make sense and a neat lots of trees effect to hide the fact that the map is tilebased.

The bad:

The fire is currently “if hp < maxhp then BIG FIRE ON UNIT end”.

I really wanted the size of the fire to depend on the size of the unit and how hurt the unit is, but I was just so rushed for time. I also wanted units to heal over time, but never got around to it, so if a unit is hurt even once it will remain on fire until it dies.

The AI is kind of random and doesn’t really protect it’s main base very well. It also never acts offensively; if it attacks you it’s because you’re too close to its merchants.

The map generator has a habit of creating inland cities. It also has a slight chance of spawning capitals directly adjacent to each other, and a hopefully slighter chance of locking up during the map generation process in which case the program would need to be restarted.

The game never says YOU WIN or YOU LOSE even if you destroy every enemy or an enemy destroys every one of you.

The selection mechanics were a bit clunky. If multiple units are in front of your mouse ,which one is selected is random. It is impossible to double click on a unit to select all of that type of unit, which is annoying because selecting all war ships without selecting any of your merchants is something you will want to do often.

Merchants will occasionally stop what they are doing and become idle. This happens often when the AI tries to order a merchant to trade with an inland colony.

Some undeveloped features are obvious, like the fact that you can “capture” colonies, yet their ownership is meaningless.

Due to the lack of variety in game elements, the strategy is somewhat flat.

There is a total lack of sound/music.

And there are a bunch of other minor bugs that managed to persist due to a lack of playtesting.

more thoughts:

I’m very pleased with the game that I managed to create, and have been enjoying the positive feedback.

It’s been a week, and I’ve mostly been busy, but I have started on a postcompo version.

So, as you can see in the cropped screenshot, there is some variation in the size of fires according to how hurt the unit is. You can also see  some aesthetic changes (like the shores), and an area of influence for buildings under a player’s control that provides healing to that player’s units. Also, there are no inland colonies.

[EDIT http://www.mediafire.com/file/ozfezytzyzv/TinyArmada1.1.zip]

Look at that, it has a name now.

Ok, so since I last made a post a lot has changed. The AI now makes ships and does stuff. the units and cities now look like units and cities. there is a bit of a user interface for current gold and unit creation. Paths are simplified to diagonals after they have been determined. Also, some minor tweaks all over.

Grab it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=preview&uid=1168

Now featuring pathfinding and gold carrying.

Well, it probably won’t be very well finished, but it looks like it’ll be somewhat playable in the next few hours. I just need to make some AI, a better UI, and make everything look better.

I’ve officially switched from the common and boring sandy beach and pale blue water style to the deep green ground and slightly green water. It looks much nicer.

Also, I have a fancy draw lots of trees as blobs thing, which I think is ok. I’ll probably do something similar to make the ground a more interesting shape/color.

The units/colonies are all placeholder graphics right now. The only really interesting thing with them is that each one is made up of two different images, one drawn normally and the other one tinted red or blue depending on the team.

There’s still a lot of gamelogic to be coded if I intend to finish this, and I’m not really feeling inspired enough to work fast.

I slept in longer than I meant to. Anyways, I’ve started on some of the happening stuff. As you can see, the boat circles that were created at the dock squares are sailing around the sea by following paths and making ripples as they do so.

Islands is a boring/unexpected theme.

Anyways, my current idea looks like this:

is here.

Umm, just testing an explored/not explored concept. everythings black at first, but then as the light moves around the stuff starts to appear.

Yeah, I’m still not really sure what I’m gonna do.

Well, ludumdare 15 was my first and I think I did pretty well then, though I could’ve done better. I’m hoping to enter this time, hence the post, but I’m pretty sure I’m busy a lot of the weekend. I’ll just try to be quick I guess.

Love2D has worked alright for me in the past, so if I do get around to making anything, that’s what I’ll be using.

Good luck to everybody else as well; let’s break the record for number of entries again.

Finished!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-13/?action=preview&uid=1168

It’s a pretty simple game, with minimal graphics, and math questions as the primary feature. Making an “educational” game is really weird.

I tried to keep the content difficulty pretty low so as to make sure most age groups are able to do it.

My first time working with flash, turned out alright. (Though there are those things that don’t work as I expect and drive me crazy until I figure them out)..

No sound; just numbers.

Made by myself, Matthew Hyndman.

I present: Cave Bounce version 1.1 (Windows executable, 1.8MB)

The premise is simple: there are two superimposed caves on top of each other, and you can change which is active at any given time. By doing so you must navigate through puzzles, collect coins, and dodge missiles.

A pretty screenshot: (the player just died and was reset to the start of the level point, hence the seemingly floating)

Changes include:

-drawing the thin outline of the back layer in front of the frontmost layer, so you have an idea of the shape of the back layer.

-a color indication (light/dark green)  of whetehr or not the player is currently able to change layers.

-Several minor changes, including slight tweaking of missile speeds and such; they’re still roughly the same, but they are a little slower/turrets fire a bit less often.

-A subtle gradient background (before it was solid black)

-More levels! I scrapped and redesigned some of the ‘boring’ older levels, and added more new exciting levels, some of which are puzzle only and some of which are missile oriented. There are now 25 levels to the old 20.  Some of the coin locations are now more realisticly obtainable (the staircase screen should be doable for 100% coins now), and there are some new difficult to obtain coins.

-Before, as long as the centre of the player was not a wall on the back layer you can switch, which caused curious half of the player is in a wall situations. I added in a quick feature so that if this is the case, the player should be popped a little bit over to be out of the wall.

-I added some more HUD ocunter stuffs: you now see the FPS and how far you have progressed. seeing that you are on screen 22/25 is more motivation to finish than just knowing that you’re 20 some out of who knows how many

-When the player dies, he is reset to the start of teh screen. Before this did not change the layer, so it could potentially stick him in a wall, so it now also reverts the active layer to the layer of incoming.

-I reduced the number of particles somewhat so things will run a bit faster (not a lot), while still looking the same.

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Postmortem stuff: (After Death?)

Woo! This was my first LD ever, and I loved it, came out great. I’ve entered another 48 hour comp before, but I was less experienced and more or less failed at that one. ( We made a game, it just wasn’t very deep)

The good:

no big problems, I had a fairly cool idea and it all seemed to flow.

Missiles and coins were both last minute additions, and yet the game would’ve been pretty boring without them. I’m quite glad they ended up there.

I made a game. in 48 hours. that is fun to play. I’m happy.

The bad:

No music or sound effects. They are, at the moment, somethign that I do not do. Sorry all.

I overused particles a bit, and so it runs slowly on weaker machines. this slowness can cause bugs like skipping through walls in extreme cases.

the art really wasn’t great (the player is a circle), although it did end up being fairly stylish.

Map design was somewhat rushed, and so wasn’t great (although it’s still good)

Difficulty level is a bit high and intimidates some. Unfortunately for them, I like action games as well as puzzlers, so this is likely still the case. Fear not, it is all quite doable, and there are several screens that are missile free.

Summary:

I had fun and am looking forward to future LDs