PS: Applying the first exemption of the second Compo rule, I will use some personal classes that handle tilesets, animations and resolution.

I heard twa thousand corbies making a game.

I began this compo with several hours of sleeping and thinking. But now I’ve reached my first milestone! There is not much to see here – I’m using placeholder graphics for today – but I pretty much got the player-character’s movement working.
In this game, mankind has screwed up their own evolution. The player controls a raven, feasting on the dying humans.

Oh, and by the way: I’m in too.

Originally, I intended to write a post-mortem and include this timelapse recording for illustration. But apparently in these days I can find neither the time nor the energy to write such a thing. Scroll down to read it! So here is my timelapse. There are a lot of screen messages in there – enjoy!
And don’t forget to play and rate my game

Post Mortem

—Tools—
Ok, I should at least give you a list of tools I used and how they worked out for me.
I made this game in Processing, and I just used the standard code editor that comes with this API. It’s probably more basic and tedious than full blown IDEs, but – at least for a small project like this – it worked pretty well.

My sprites and fonts were drawn in in GIMP. I didn’t make a lot of them (there’s just one 2×2 tileset for objects and one 3×3 for the walls), but still there are quite a few comments saying how good my game looks. I think, I kind of got a hang of how to set a good mood through interesting colors and effects programming (do your eyes bleed yet?)

For level editing I used the game itself. I implemented a tiny little editing-mode where I could just click on any point of the game window and a wall would appear there. Later I added a save_level() function where I could just press ‘s’ and save the current layout to a file. When wrapping up the game I just disabled the editing functions. I liked this method and intend to keep using it for future projects.

Sadly, there was no time to add sound to the game, but I would have used Audacity and MilkyTracker. Music would probably be unfitting, but some ambience would be nice.

—Content—
The texts that appear in between levels were supposed to add someting poetic or philosophic to my game, but I wrote them ten minutes before the deadline so the formulations are still a bit rough. The basic thoughts are already there, though.

So there was the deadline, the game submitted, but it still had no title. I came up with the word “extensionism” and googled it. I’ve never before heard about this metaphysical theory, but it sounded interesting, so I went with it. Had I found this earlier, I would have incorporated it into my game somehow.

What about the game mechanics? Are they fun? Are they interesting? I’m still not shure. Initially, I was quite convinced my concept would work out, but it was only bare bones and I racked my brain to come up with good additions to it. This is my main “what went wrong” this time: too much time was spent (read wasted) on doubtfully overthinking my mechanics. If there’s one thing that had to be perfect, it was the concept! And the bad thing is, it isn’t. All that crate-pushing Sokoban-likeness is just plainly tedious. Because of this, I almost abandoned the project alltogether, but luckily, my pride protected me from this fate. In retrospective I guess, I was on the right path from the beginning, and I just have to accept that 48h-games are never big, sublime masterpieces (although, some of you have come pretty close ). Well, I’m always pretty harsh on myself, so I’m even more thankful for all the positive comments on my submission page. Apparently, I made something interesting after all.

Oops, I just recognized this text has accidentally become a real post-mortem. Forget about the very first paragraph (exept the part where I tell you to play my game. )!

Thank you for reading!

…there are ways to extend it.

I worked mostly on the appearence of my game for the last couple hours. Have a look:

Because my core mechanic doesn’t do very well on it’s own, there is not much game-play yet. But there are ways to extend it…

After I have gotten some sleep, of course.

I made this fairly simple game to familiarize myself with the new environment I’m using. It is a more constructive interpretation of classic Breakout: instead of destroying blocks, you create them. See how many blocks you can make before losing your ball or getting it stuck.
But there’s an alternative way of playing this: try to get the ball stuck deliberately, using as few blocks as possible.

It’s not doodle-based in any way, bit I’m submiting anyways. Maybe, on a more abstract level, you could consider the game itself a doodle… ah, nevermind.

Controls: mouse or arrow keys. Space or mousebutton resets.

Play it in your browser (source included)

This is my initial doodle, made in english class, where we talked about Prince Charles’ aversion to modern architecture.

I then came up with the following concept. I’m not shure yet if I will use it.

I want to use this MiniLd to finally overcome my dependence on Game Maker and become familiar with Processing.

In the original version of my game I locked the window size to 1280×960, which turned out as a bad thing to do. Some people were complaining that the edges of the screen were cut off. To solve this problem I have now implemented an options-menu that allows you to switch between window sizes. You can also press F5 to toggle. While I was at it, I also made a proper windowed-mode and fixed some minor bugs. I don’t know how the game looks on widescreen now – if there are any problems, please report!
If you have experienced low framerates, you can now press F10 to deactivate the dynamic vignetting effect and replace it with a single sprite. This damages the look and mood very badly – use it only if the game runs really slow! (press F11 to see the fps)

You can get the updated version here (Windows): dywa_elfrth_1.1.exe
New source is also available: dywa014.gm6
And please don’t forget to rate: Submission Page

In other news: A friend of mine made a YTPMV (youtube poop music video) using the soundtrack of my game. It’s really awesome so… go ahead and watch it!

The Darkness You Wander Alone

This is a short retro-acion-platformer. You are wielding the sword of swords to shoot your way though darkness and hordes of mysterious hostile creatures. Enjoy!
I spent most of the available time on that darkness/vignetting effect and on playing around with sine wave interference (which you can see in the title screen), but I think that was worth it. I’d love to add more content, a story and an actual ending – we’ll see…
Also, this was not only my first Ludum Dare but this is the first game I ever released.

Controls: Arrow keys + Z + X

The tools I used:
- Game Maker 6.1
- Musagi and Audacity (sound)
- Gimp (some graphics)

This is Eelfroth, signing off. I was in!

EDIT: Does anybody have the new Game Maker version and can compile the game for mac, please?

Download for Windows
Download Source
Submission page