So here’s what I have. It’s written in Flex, uses Box2D for physics, and is REALLY REALLY LAGGY. I have it open in another tab and Firefox 3 is updating the text in this edit field at about 2 fps.

This is Box2DFlash’s debug rendering - I haven’t had time to implement my own - hence lack of graphics and colours and general prettiness. The grey boxes around the edge are enemies; they spawn every 2 seconds from either the left or the right. The slightly larger grey box in the middle is the player. The circles are bullets shot by the player. They don’t do damage (the boxes cannot be killed!) but they do force the enemy boxes back. Each box jumps vaguely in the direction of the player every second or so.

The idea is that the boxes are attacking and you have to push them down to prevent them from touching you. But since you can’t kill them, eventually the whole screen piles up with boxes and you inevitably die.

The boxes were supposed to have smarter AI, and intentionally build towers of themselves rather than just stupidly launching themselves towards you, but that’s obviously not going to happen in time. The other flaw in the plan is that it’s REALLY REALLY LAGGY.

It’s kinda almost fun to play around with, being a physics simulation, but there are too many problems (too laggy, needs proper rendering, too laggy, bullets need to die on impact, need limited ammo and ammo drops, too laggy, need health and dying, needs survival timer, too laggy, needs sound) and too little time to fix them - I have to go to bed now for university tomorrow, and although the deadline is 1pm local time I won’t be able to work on it tomorrow at all. Even if I did fix everything in time, I’m not convinced it’d be a fun game. So I guess I’m calling this one quits.

I’ve failed! Hope you all have better luck!

Minimalist game. Few pixels. Few words.

Download.

Windows, run executable. Ignore errors. They claim fatality. They lie.

Others, need python, pygame. Run python main.py

Here’s what I have so far, in source code form. I can’t be bothered packaging it up properly right now, so you will need Python and pygame to run this:

Click to download

How to play:

• Goal: Reach the exit
• Left and right move
• If you’re not holding anything, spacebar picks up crates from in front of you
• If you are holding something, spacebar drops it in front of you
• Don’t touch enemies
• Enemies die if you drop a crate on them
• Press a digit 1…9 to skip to a level.

If you die, the game will quit. If you win the game, it will also quit. If you’re running from a console it’ll tell you which was which, but otherwise you have to guess! Just my way of fighting back against the evil GUI oppressors.

If you need to restart a level (either ‘cos you got stuck or died), quit the game, restart it, and press a level skip button. I’ll code in a restart level feature later, don’t worry…

Obligatory screenshot follows. The Anonymous Game Hero (he isn’t E.T.’s Ugly Twin any more, I redrew him more simply - I mean, more minimalisticly!) is shown here holding a crate, waiting for the Not-So-Big Bad to wander over and offer itself up for a squishing.

Incidentally, and coincidentally, this game scores highly on the time-to-crate index.

In just over an hour, including player movement. Not too bad. (Although I’ve spent like 10 minutes on this post. Gah!) I’m going to have a dinner break now, and then spend my remaining 2 hours on actual gameplay.

I know, I know, it’s ugly as sin. My artistic skills are, uh, minimalist. The character at least definitely needs work.
The gameplay currently consists of moving left and right until you get bored. A Sokoban-ish clone with gravity is the planned gameplay. E.T.’s Ugly Twin here will be able to lift blocks above his head and place them down, either to make his way to the exit (by building piles / filling in holes) or to crush monsters. Because, as everyone’s favourite anti-games lawyer idiot knows, no game is complete without at least a little bit of ultra-violence

Minimalism is present in at least the following ways:

• Colour palette (totally monochrome, baby!)
• My artistic skills
• Pixels (all sprites are 12×12 pixel art)
• Squinting required (the sprites are resized up to 48×48 pixels so that they’re visible to the human eye)

There are others, but I’ll leave them up to you to guess!

Hi there. My name is Chris, I’m the guy responsible for this game, and this is my first Ludum Dare ever. I’m going to use a library which I haven’t touched for literally years (pygame), in a language which I hardly ever use (Python). I only decided to enter half an hour ago (after the contest started - yes, I’m that hardcore), so I’m completely unprepared.

No matter. I’ve probably got pygame installed… do I? Oh yeah, I do. That’s good. So… how does one use this, again? Meh. I’m sure there’s a tutorial on the net somewhere.

Did I mention that I’m going to a party tomorrow? That will take up pretty much the whole day, and mean that I probably won’t be up and functional before noon the day after, which is the deadline. So I only have tonight available, and it’s currently 6pm here. Factoring in an hour for dinner and assuming a responsible bedtime of 10pm, that means I have… three hours.

Hmm. Oh well. At least there’s crap-all on TV.

Maybe I should stop typing English and start typing code right about now.

Any second now….

…wait for i