The official time is up, but if you haven’t even started yet, now’s the time! It’s a long weekend for those of us in the US, so take as much time as you need on this. I’ve tried a few of the entries and was super impressed; can’t wait to try more. Thanks for playing and I hope you found this as enjoyable as I have!

Several people seem to be attempting beat-based music games, so for your convenience, here are the tempos of each song in the sample pack (not including the noise/static tracks):

Kontinuum - Pulsar - 170bpm
Destroysound - Maggies Circle Acid - 140bpm
Kontinuum - Safe, Asleep In The Library - 140bpm
Kontinuum - Sphere - 170bpm

They were all exported directly from a host audio program and so should sync up perfectly at those tempos.

Really excited to see how what you guys turn out. Have fun! 

And the theme is….

TIME

Rules:

• All development will be done in 48 hours, solo, from scratch, except for whatever audio libraries you chose to use.
• You must incorporate sounds from the sample archive located here. You can do whatever you want with the sounds, and they do NOT need to be played back in an audio form, just incoporated SOMEHOW into the final product. You could, for example, procedurally make levels based on them.
• You may also download the entire soundpack here (warning - it is 156MB!)
• You may manipulate the sounds however you like. You can cut apart the loops to get one-shot samples, remix the .XMs or rip the samples out of them, or whatever.
• You may use as many sounds as you like, or as few as 1.
• The theme, Time, is just meant to give you an alternate starting point for your brainstorming. Focus as much as you want on the soundpack, or not at all.
• Edit: I am streaming the entire sample pack here for your listening pleasure. All told (without the MIDI data) there is 51 minutes worth of content. If you’re not already, consider joining #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org to discuss your ideas!
• Have fun!

Just a reminder that you have 5 days to finish your research for Mini-LD #9. The rules are:

• You may use any code you write between now and Friday, May 22nd at 9:00pm EST, but ONLY if it pertains to playing or processing sound.
• You will be provided with a resource pack containing sound assets for use in your game.
• Sounds will be provided in the following formats:
  • MP3/OGG
  • XM
  • WAV
  • General MIDI songfiles
• Due to the size of the resource pack, I will make all sounds available on a webpage so that you can preview them and select the ones you want.
• All other code for your project must be written from-scratch, during the compo.

Here is the original announcement. Good luck, and see you on friday!

well, apparently i just suck a lot, because i messed up map3 on ethergrind. python’s dom chokes on it because of some malformed xml. here is a fixed copy of the xml for those of you with nerves of steel who can make it that far. drop it in the /maps directory. alternatively, i’ve just gone ahead and fixed the download link from the original post; feel free to disregard levels 3-5 if you wish when you vote.

also, you’ll be happy to know that it IS beatable. many levels, however, took me several playthroughs; notably level 2 and level 3 are fiendishly difficult. some tips:

level 2: use speed and boost through the level until you reach the last grinder. take out the turrets first and let the enemy ships you’ve dodged come back. destroy them all before trying the boss. make sure to take out the cannons before you fight the boss.

level 3: just power through with speed. this is just really hard.

level 4: for the asteroid area, concentrate on going slowly and eliminating all enemies as they appear. when you get to the grinders, dodge like hell.

level 5: make sure to pick up all of the powerups. it will give you enough to get a shield. when you get to the boss, fly straight through him (losing your shield) and keep going until there is enough space for you to deal with the enemy ships. then fly to the top and bottom of the screen and take out the turrets before engaging the boss. it’s very, very hard. good luck.

thanks for the comments, guys, all the games i’ve played are top notch. congrats to everybody!

Submissions for Ludum Dare #14 may have just ended, but don’t retire your braincells and pack your coffee mugs away quite yet. Because on May 22 at 9PM EST… destroysound presents… a Ludum Dare production…

MINI LD #9
May 22, 2009, 9PM EST-May 24, 2009, 9PM EST

Yes, it’s a little early to announce this, but I want to make sure everyone has some time to adequately prepare. I’m going to spoil the theme slightly here by telling you that whatever tools you decide to use, you will need to be able to have access to a computer (gasp) with a soundcard (shocking) and some method of replicating sound (i suggest headphones or speakers) as well as an environment that can play back one of the following types of sound/music files:

• .WAV sounds
• .MP3 or .OGG tracks
• .MID music files
• .XM modules

The more of these you can support, the better.

Any code you write with this intent between now and then is acceptable for use in the compo. That means you can’t write your game now, but any code you write (or have written) that experiments with sound, manipulates sounds or otherwise mangles/destroys your audio interface is A-OK to use. All game logic must be developed in the 48 hour timelimit.

In addition (this is not required), you might want to get familiar with some sort of audio editing tool/music tracking software/thing to make your soundcard flip out, if you so wish. For free tools of this sort, check out Audacity, MilkyTracker or Pure Data. In addition, people have written some nice audio generation tools specifically for LD and game design: check out SFXR if you haven’t already. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to respond to this post and let us know what you use.

Aaaaand.. that’s all you need to know about MiniLD #9 right now. I’ll make another announcement after the post-compo hysteria dies down. Hopefully you are intrigued enough to give it a shot. See you then!

EtherGrind Timelapse

Music is “Do You Know Squarepusher” by Squarepusher.
Annotations so you know what the heck is going on.

:: ethergrind ::
:: distribution (source and win32 .exe) ::
:: source requires pygame and pgu ::

:: keys ::
:: arrows - move ::
:: space - shoot ::
:: enter - accept powerup ::
:: f - turn on high-quality visual effects ::
:: esc - quit (why would you want to do that?) :: 

:: start main.exe or main.py with the -f switch to run in full screen mode :: 

5/6 powerups are coded, level format is done. need a way to finish levels.. still, this leaves me with all day tomorrow to generate content. i might try to make a boss, but i wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

I made some delicious shrimp fried rice.

Frying the veggies and shrimp.

Rice ahoy!

Om nom nom.

Also, this.

I’m making a classic-style shooter, heavily inspired by R-Type and Gradius.

There will be many advancing walls of doom, although I haven’t really decided what direction they will be advancing from (most likely ALL DIRECTIONS, CRUSHING YOU BETWIXT THEM LIKE UNFORTUNATE SPACE JAM).

I spent a good few hours cranking out a nice motion blur effect. Here it is in action.

This is roughly the scene in #ludumdare right now. Based on this PBF strip.

We herd u like game programming compos, so we put a caffiene injection system in your fridge so you can code until you die.

edit: windows exe released.

monoclimb - windoze .exe and source distribution - python, pygame, pgu required.

THE MENS ARE ATTACKING YOU’RE BASE. YOU ARE FAST ENOUGH MOUSE CLICKER TO DEFEAT ALL THE MENS. THREE MINUTE TIME LIMIT FOR BEATING ALL OPPOSING ARM. YOU MUST SHOOT ALL THE MENS.

it saves its score in score.dat or else it gets the hose again.

I decided that I had nothing better to do this morning so I started on an entry. Here’s what I’ve got so far. This should look very familiar; this game has been remade about a million times under different names. The guys are going to be able to climb up over one another until they can get on top of your turret and blow it up. It will get increasingly difficult and the goal is to survive until you either get 1000 points, or 3 minutes elapse.

This is a bugfix for Roadz. I’m pretty sure there is an issue with the timing code on Windows ONLY (as in, it doesn’t work at all and makes the game even more ridiculously hard.) This release should stop that from happening. Includes Win32 binary and Python source. The original is still up if you want to take a look.

Edit: Making this fix broke something else non-critical (but annoying!) in that it was truncating the times to the nearest second. That’s fixed in the above zip as well.

Source and Win32 binary, in one convenient package (unzip with PKUNZIP.EXE for best effect)

This is RoadZ. It is a tribute to less troubled times; I could have seen myself being totally stoked when I downloaded this off the neighborhood BBS. Read README.TXT for ill ASCII. Check out all the directories for bonus stuff.

I didn’t get to do the sine scroller though

EDIT: I forgot to mention that -f runs the game in fullscreen. I meant to make a .bat file, actually included it in my readme, then forgot. Just know that you CAN run fullscreen, use the -f command line switch to make it happen. I recommend it.

EDIT2: Timelapse is here.

Controls:

• UP - Accellerate
• DOWN - Brake
• LEFT/RIGHT - Steer
• SPACE - Jump (velocity sensitive)
• L ALT - Turbo

I’m pretty much done with gameplay.. now I’m going through and making levels and other content.

Since I’ll never compete with the pretty volumetric lighting in some of your games, I’ve decided to see how many lens flares I can shove into my game

Back to the grind.

Yes, so as this wears on it becomes more evident that I am, indeed, making Skyroads.

Thinking about making a web-based ‘best times’ feature, just to have SOME original content

Looking kinda pole-position-esque at the moment.

Time to design the tracks.

Checkerboard tile? Check.
F-Zero inspired sprite? Check.
Wonky psudeo-3d raycasting? Check.

I’m calling it Roadz.

ready to rok.

let’s go roads!

Time for some thoughts. Check them out below the cut.

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