Isn’t it sad that the amazing winner of the BEST COMMUNITY award last time wouldn’t have any entries at all? :’-( At least I made a game. It was my dad’s birthday and I am home for the holidays, so that I found any time at all is pretty surprising.

LOL

LOL

XD

I am laughing so hard. This is so great. #1 at not actually making a game! I knew you all would like my crepes. Next time I will make something even more awesome.

But more seriously, I think I could have rocked it (in overall too, of which I got approx #200) had I had the time to balance the game, so next time I’ll bring it.

Also, I’ve got 5 levels to the post-compo game now and a nice difficulty curve. I will post here when ready.

The music is from Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

I’ll agree with them. I’ve only beaten it once. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before completing any levels other than the first one, which wasn’t anything but a tutorial. As such, I copy/pasted a bunch of obstacles and placed them at semi-regular intervals throughout the level and called it a day. Too bad. The game supports loading multiple levels and I was planning on having a nice difficulty ramp across them. The first level was originally supposed to be the tutorial and like one more trap.

One commenter (Notch) said it feels like trial and error, which is actually partially what I was going for. I remember the game n+ where you just try each level over and over until you’ve mastered all the traps and the like, and I kind of wanted that feel. Part of what I was missing, I think, is the everything-on-the-screen you get from sideways 2D. The perspective the camera has and the amount of playing field you can see makes it very difficult to see far enough ahead of you to make any sort of difference. Basically the only option is to die and restart several times so that you know where everything is beforehand. And get a bit lucky.

Last minute I added in a bullet-time ability that really helps a lot, but having made it a limited timer (1 second of bullet time, takes 2 seconds to charge) means you don’t really get it enough. In retrospect, I think it would have been cool to subtract money from your character as you use it, thereby giving you as much as you want bit still adding in the pressure of not using it too much.

The biggest problem though I think is just the curve. Level 1 should be a piece of cake, and there should be around 10 very short levels. That way when you restart you’re not forced to redo the whole thing. That or checkpoints, maybe.

I still think the game is a great idea and I’d love to see it on iPhone some time in the future. Just needs a bit of tweaking.

All that’s left is actually designing and creating the levels, and a bit of tweaking!

The plot:

You are benevolent temple spirit who is tired of seeing adventurers fall to their doom in the ancient Mayan temple to are bound to. Another adventurer (name Jones) has just arrived, and he’s already got himself in trouble – a giant boulder is chasing him, and he’s got to make it through a giant gauntlet of dangerous traps. Like all adventurers, this one is very stupid and just runs blindly forwards! It’s your job to alter his path by placing walls in his way, and also protecting him from arrows, lava pits, and more. And don’t forget to pick up treasure!

I have the following done:

- Jones runs! He steers!
- Jones takes damage and dies when he hits traps!
- Traps are made:
- Arrows that shoot from faces in the wall!
- A massive boulder that follows you unceasingly!
- Bubbling lava pits that kill you instantly if you touch them!
- Click-and-drag to create walls in order to protect Jones and show him where to go!
- Moar exclamation points!!!!!

Still to do:
- Game tweakage
- More traps
- Level design
- Powerups
- Money pickups

I have a few hours I can work today, then that’s it. Hoping to get this done to a level that makes it fun. Still, I’m really very proud of this already and I think it’ll be great for only having 10 hours or so to work on it.

Outrunnin' Boulders and Arrows

OMG Close Call

Magic Walls!

I had some delicious nutella crepes for one of my meals yesterday, and they were amazing? Crepes are the greatest contribution French culture has ever had on the world.

Cookin' a Crepe

I made a giant stack of them.

Nice stack, baby

The nutella formed into some very strange letters, too!

Mysterious "LD" in my Crepe

OMG! A boulder!

In the world in front of you is a little man who is very fast but unfortunately very stupid. He has found himself in an ancient crypt and wants treasure! Naturally, this crypt has a giant boulder, lava, shooting arrows, walls closing in, and more hazards. You are a benevolent wall-building-spirit who is tired of seeing adventurers die. As a result, you will be building walls to protect the adventurer from traps, help him collect treasure, and get him out of the crypt before he is crushed by the boulder!

Click-and-drag to draw a wall. Character runs and does very simple pathfinding around obstacles. Collect treasure. Don’t die.

I’m starting late but I’m really looking forward to this one!

The themes are almost all excellent.

If you’ll forgive a bit of advertising here, I thought this might be useful for you all. My company (ngmoco / DeNA) has just publicly release their mobage (moh bah gay) game SDK publicly, which allows you to write games in Javascript on top of a library similar to Cocos2D or Slick and then run it on iPhone, Android, and Flash. It also is backed by a giant social network so you get access to lots of users, achievements, badges, etc., and you can deploy both in the US and Japan very easily.

I’ve used it personally and find it easy to work with and fast. I figured it might be useful to a lot of you guys who want to try out the mobile market. Let me know if you have any questions.

https://developer.mobage.com/

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/october-challenge-2010/?action=preview&uid=531

Either way, I’m happy that because A Lasting Impression was from an 84 hour project it has only around 15 source files. It’s in Java, so I’ll need to port it to Objective-C, but once I’ve got the physics and the rendering pathway all settled the rest should be quick and easy (Valet Hustle’s engine was one I originally made in Java and then ported over to Objective-C, so I’m already pretty good at the process).

My current target is to have the original Java game running on the iPhone by the end of the week. That will leave me about another week to add in some more entities and features, then I can submit it and hopefully get it approved just before the end of October. But that may be unrealistic – I may need to content myself with having it submitted by the 31st, but actually making a few bucks afterwards. Apple is notorious for taking forever.

Because my free time is sparse, I was thinking I’d port over a game I made for an 84-hour compo. That way, I can spend less time drawing and planning and more time just finding the bits about the game that were fun. Also in the interest of saving time, I might make this in Unity, although I hadn’t decided. If I don’t, I’ll just use the iPhone framework I already have and find some iPhone 2D physics library I can use – does anybody know any good ones?

I’m going to port over “A Lasting Impression.” You can find it here: http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,19135.0.html

I think its main improvements will come from creating a challenge before the time limit is up. Currently, you can get kids angry when you take their bubble gum and they run around and knock things over, but that’s the only challenging bit at all. What I’d like to do is add in more things that can potentially mess up your stack of stuff if you don’t deal with them, like angry dogs, popping-up prairie dogs, gusts of wind, and the like. Plus, I think I will get rid of the whole items falling from the sky thing and replace it with every single item being added by something. As in, an airplane might fly by, and if you throw something at it then it crashes and explodes into debris you can use, balloons float by occasionally or are attached you kids (and you must pop them to get them to come down), etc. These sorts of things will make the game much more fun that it is, I think.

With sound:

http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ZombieGrinder/ZombieGrinder.jnlp

Without sound:

http://www.otcsw.com/webstart/ZombieGrinder/ZombieGrinder-nosound.jnlp

Okay, I admit it, I was banking on “Escape” when I came up with my game idea. Therefore I will admit that the only thing that this game really has to do with islands is that it randomly takes place on one. I really would have loved to be more original here and go with the actual theme, but I was very short on time (12 hours was even far more than I suspected) and having spent 3 of that drawing the characters I had to go with I had planned. I already had design docs written up and all that beforehand and this sort of game really uses JPixel well, so that’s that.

Anyway. In Zombie Grinder you are running from a horde of zombies! I thought it would be fun to do an escape-type fighting game where you’re not limited by hit points. So, in this you can’t die unless you touch the horde on the left side of the screen. As such, even though you can be attacked by up to 50 enemies at once (I limited it because any more might slow down older systems), as long as you can stay on the right side of the screen you’re pretty safe. Turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.

I coded all the characters using the same base class, and gave the AI the ability to compare “factions” for who they wanted to attack. This ended up giving the awesome side effect of being able to drop in allies (same faction as the player) with very little fuss. All I had to do was draw a new character (or just tint the player’s guy, of course). This adds a very cool element where you’re running madly from these zombies and you can have some dumb friends drop in and distract some of the zombies. I really would have loved to play on this mechanic more but obviously didn’t have the time.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. It’s a simple little time waster that does, more or less, what I went for. And the number of moves you can do, along with the complexity of the combat system, is pretty awesome. My big disappointment is that I didn’t finish doing weapons in time – trust me, they would have been awesome.

Anyway, give it a play and let me know what you think.  This could use a lot more work and quite a bit more polish (worst backgrounds ever!), but hey we can’t have everything. And don’t worry about losing – you can’t!

PS – Yes indeedy the gameplay and characters are inspired by River City Ransom.

My favorite screenshot

Lots of zombies and a few allies

Screenshots later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGy94EFjw1k