Due to popular demand, I give you the ‘cat vend’ game theme song.  I threw it together for the game literally at the last moment, did it in one take per track via Audacity, and unfortunately quietly (screws up the sound) because it was early in the morning. The melody is Journey’s of course but there are actually a number of instrument and arrangement modifications so that it ‘goes to 11′.  I hardly ever do covers but it fit the theme so well, I had to do it.  I figured they wouldn’t mind since they apparently found their last singer on Youtube or some such thing doing covers of their songs. I should have some new actually good tracks coming soon for the ‘Adventures of Robin Hood’ album project since I’m finally on vacation.

http://www.4shared.com/mp3/zqvGdqSX/catvend.html

Here’s a brief synopsis of how “There’s Waldo” came to be.  Some LD guys and I were in a google hangout, and I bounced a bunch of ideas off of everyone, one real good one was a reimagining of “Where’s Waldo” with none of the people except Waldo, and when you click him, it says “there’s waldo” as if you didn’t know.  The game is completely defeated this way, but I think it says something about “alone” vs. “not alone”, besides being hilarious.  So anrdres and I bring you ‘There’s Waldo’, thanks to everyone who helped put this together so quickly and for the chat.

http://t.co/ciPUrpCo

Another idea we had was to make a big splash screen for a multiplayer game, and then have it say “couldn’t find friends to play with” and it just shows you sitting there at that screen.  I figured this was a modern way to show how alone affects gameplay in some games… if you can’t find anyone to play with, the game is totally useless.  Also batted around were things like playing a team sport as the only player on the field, the score still moves and you have the ball but that’s it.

Well I have run out of time for the competition, so I turned in cat vend.  I am very happy with the adhoc song I did this morning.  It’s a parody, yes, so I can’t take credit for the melody but I don’t think the band would be offended and I felt it fit with the spirit of LD to add that.  I think it helps play to the absurdity and humor I intended this time with my entry.  I wanted to make a claw game and the theme ended up being alone, so my first thought was to make a claw game with just one object left in it.  Then I figured why not have it be something that moves around, like a cat.  I really didn’t intend to make a “kitten” themed game, although there is a kitten hidden in my game aside from the cat.

http://www.devinmoore.com/catvend/appletholder.html

disclaimer: This game is not implying that a cat is being abused or that anyone should put a cat in a claw game, etc.

I have a ton of the control code and the actual vend machine digital outline done, the big obstacle is drawing in the cable for the vend claw in the right position on the sprite.

Mockups:

http://twitpic.com/7ugogr

The theme is alone, so I’m not sure how closely this matches, but the folks in the chat can attest that i did this after the theme came out. It’s a side view cat vending machine with just one cat left in it. when you try to pick him up with the claw (claw game style), he moves around, making it really hard. Screenshots pending probably tomorrow.

I figured this might be interesting to some people, to see how little time I project I will actually get to spend — hopefully this makes my entries make a little more sense.

1. design  Friday night max 2 hrs.  asset creation Saturday morning max 4 hrs.

2. asset creation / code development – saturday 11am-1pm, 3-5pm?

3. testing – either saturday 5-7pm and/or sunday morning 1-2 hrs.

4. release – saturday beta, sunday final for competition in morning.

Max total: design 2, development /asset creation 8, testing 4 = 14 hours.  Of course, this doesn’t count family time where I am thinking about what has to get done, just the actual max time I may be able to put hands to keyboard.

I should be able to make something this time, I am hoping for a significantly cool game i.e. something that 1-up’s Dream Escape.

I am in LD 21.  I will be most likely using Java as noted in my video.

FYI, the riff I did in my video is from my new album “Tales of Arthur”.

This game is disturbing.  It is based on actual war stories I heard from my grandfather.  Could you make impossible choices in order to survive a real war?  I don’t have that much content yet, but as I can remember more by the deadline, I will add them.

The ending is deliberately anti-climactic, because the real victory is just to live and continue.

http://devinmoore.com/actualwar/devinswar.php

Pit dive is done in demo web mode:

http://www.devinmoore.com/pitdive/appletholder.html

It doesn’t have all the elements I initially wanted, but that’s mostly because the game took a turn in a more interesting direction once i started adding in stats.  I just thought it would be interesting to show the number of moves, digs, etc. and then I got inspired to make a score based on the total level of descent minus the amount of moves it took to get there.   This causes the game to move into way more strategy vs. just button mashing, which makes the game way more compelling.  If you blast to the end, you will have a crap score, probably a negative score.  I got as high as 150 or so trying pretty hard.  Bugs: don’t dig past the edges of the level… I didn’t finish handling this for the demo but I will fix it soon, as usual I am running low on time and I wanted to stop someplace sensible vs. having a bunch of buggy, half-implemented features.

Pitdive is looking really good… for an ascii game.  you can climb, dig out walls, falling scrolls from middle, even without any other features it is pretty compelling to mess around with at this point.

core: java applet, ascii, vertical downward scroll only when you’re “falling”, you fall until you land on something, all that is now working.  Looking real good! (for an ascii game that is)

A: Name of the game – pitdive

B: Description (140 chars) – dive into a never-ending pit of exploration.

C: One mockup image – see below

D: Definition of Done: (Example) 3 levels, 3 enemy types, 1 boss, music track, sfx

Done = 1 “unending” level, enemies, a boss,  weapons, sfx.

So I had about 3 hours to make a game from scratch, because of my crazy schedule.  After doing the keynote video with my old mac I thought I’d try an old mini D/A style game, because for one thing those games were tiny sized and should be doable pretty fast.  However, this still took a while and I was disappointed with the lack of cross-platform testing I got in (doesn’t work right on linux firefox, but works on windows firefox… wtf?  Anyhow, thanks for that Oracle.  Way to make java cross-platform compatible).  I was really happy with how the applet actually came together architecturally and how closely it matches what I wanted it to be.  Unfortunately there is one bug I found with the tornado, but I can fix that post-ld and I hope to make a suite of smallish survival games like this to help people play with the supposed “right thing to do” in various simplified survival scenarios.

Final update:  the dang download died at 94%, hit bandwidth cap.  argh! sorry all.  I do have the zip still though.

I created a zip of all the games.  1.5 gigs.  Where do i put that? lol. no idea.

Update: trying to upload to a big file site.  Says they will hold up to 2gb.  says it will take a while, i’ll post the link here when its done.

I tried to zip all of them together, I think I got nearly all but with 305 it’s hard to say for sure without it taking forever to make the zip, and some of the web ones… i’m not sure how it handled those, but the various source/bin archives should all be here.

Note:  For future reference, it would make lives a LOT easier if you name your zip/etc something like your user id + game name, there were many “ld 20″ and related and if you have a great downloader, that works, but for me it may have overwritten several of them.

Update: ~20-30 of them had server errors, etc. and so they didn’t get pulled down.  If you added a file, i’d double check it’s upload location because that’s a pretty high number so it could be you got d/l capped or similar.

Also a question: how far can you get in zelda if you don’t “take this”?  Without cheats?

I couldn’t help but do this early as I was struck by the inspiration and couldn’t let the idea get away from me before the contest “officially” started.  I made a few decisions early:  worst language i could use to make a game = javascript.  Worst interface = buttons only.   Worst genre = zork type games, with random results only, meaning nothing you pick matters.  I added even more frustration by making the actions you can pick totally arbitrary, generic, and meaningless, reducing it to just “do something”.  This game incorporates just about everything I hate about the games that I hate into one, with the exception of the game that has a lousy ending following a massive amount of gameplay.

http://devinmoore.com/worstgame.html

Basic gameplay done, now I’m working on setting the data/etc so that the game is winnable but not too easy.

Idea done, Got a clean screenshot of progress on game itself. Have timelapse as well for the final, its sweet.

I’ll try to make a more serious effort this go-around in honor of Tron Legacy, which hopefully will help grow another generation of game developers the way that Tron did for my generation.

I am pretty happy with how Smores Attack came out in the end, although it is not as fully featured as I had hoped.  With my first LD done, now I understand the basic issues I am likely to face making an applet game.  I have made a bunch of games before, but I hadn’t made a sprite-based, flash-looking applet game in a while, and dealing with the initial graphics setup in Java took the vast majority of my time, effort, and motivation to get through.  I had to throw away 2-3 attempts at getting the sprites to render correctly, but finally I achieved success. 

Once I had that done, making the game itself was pretty easy and fun.  I can see why so many people start with frameworks now, although I think it is really rewarding to not start with one because then my game doesn’t have all this other overhead that it doesn’t need (I’m sure it’s not as optimized as I could make it anyhow, but still it’s pretty small for what it is).  The background color change was the smartest move… the characters really pop off the screen with the blue background vs. red.  My time lapse shows the heavy editing necessary to draw the animations, many of which I didn’t have time to implement. 

time lapse video