Everything I wanted to get in feature-wise is in!  Now to get some audio in there.

I’m really happy with how this came out!  You can play the current version (and eventually the final version) at http://excitemike.com/1958_BNL.  Yes, the name of the game is odd.  Perhaps you can discover its significance.

Oh boy I feeling the lack of sleep/breaks right now.

Needing sleep pretty hard over here, but so far things are looking much better than they usually do at 5 hours in.

Doesn't look like much, I know.

The slightly-unusual control scheme is working and (I think) kind of fun, I can now load up levels made in Tiled, Collision handling seems solid (for once), the little guy’s animations change to reflect important state changes… I’m feeling good about this Ludum Dare!

Here’s the pre-compo framework/library declaration.

Framework: Stego, the as3 framework I’ve cobbled together over the course of these events.  I may go with Unity instead if for some reason I feel like going three dee once the theme is decided.

IDE: FlashDevelop.

Graphics: A copy of Photoshop CS 1 which as far as you know was obtained completely legitimately.

Music: Yet again I’ll be trying using WarioWare DIY for music.  This hasn’t worked out so well in the past, but I don’t have any better ideas.

Sound Effects: I bet you can guess this one.

Timelapse: I will be using Keeyai’s Chronolapse, unless my laptop has problems with it again.

Will be listening to: Some combination of my DragonForce station on Pandora and my 8bitcollective favorites.

Sauce Control: Mercurial, pushed to Bit Bucket.

Twitter: @ExciteMike

Interweb pagesite: http://excitemike.com/

Strategy: I have a couple of super-simple game ideas that I’d really like to try out, so odds are I’ll be shoehorning the theme into one of those.  The main issues I’ve had in previous LDs were doing crazy graphical things that take a long time to make/tweak or doing something that breaks the assumptions of my collision response code (switching to tile-based, how sliding along a surface is handled, or resting contact).  I will just make sure to do pretty standard sprite stuff for graphics, and collision-wise I think I have a much more elegant solution now where I can use hitboxes (matched to sprite animations with this tool) to detect and handle the sorts of things that needed special handling in previous games.  If I need to come up with ideas for levels, this should help me come up with something fast.

To make this post more exciting, here is a random Star Trek image:

As promised, wallpapers of screenshots from all the LD18 games:

• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1366 x 768
• 1440 x 900
• 1600 x 900
• 1600 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1080
• 1620 x 1200

(Want the Python script that generates these?  See this.)

Who wants a wallpaper made out of thumbnails from all the LD games?

This here python script (and png for the LD logo) will generate them in various sizes for you.

example output:

Once all the jam entries roll in, I’ll run it and make a post with wallpapers in various sizes for download.

It also dumps a non-resized-for-wallpaper grid.png and an xml file containing each game’s author, game id, title, etc. that maybe someday I will have a good use for.  You can quickly customize it or update for future LDs by changing the variables at the top of the file.

It requires this Python module which you may have to download and install.

EDIT:  whoops, I had a stupid bug in the part that was supposed to center the thumbnails within their grid cells and instead right-aligned ‘em.  It’s fixed if you download now.

Codexus, Docky, and Sophie Houlden are cool and I want to be just like them.

…I originally typed that to mock myself for copying them, but then I realized it is also actually the truth

An visual history of my Ludum Dare adventures thus far:

Now I don’t have to go outside again for a while.  Which is good because it is really stinking hot out there.

Framework: Stego, the as3 framework I’ve cobbled together over the course of these events.  I may go with Unity instead if for some reason I feel like going three dee once the theme is decided.

IDE: FlashDevelop. compiling with mxmlc.

Graphics: A copy of Photoshop CS 1 which as far as you know was obtained completely legitimately.

Music: I’ll try WarioWare DIY recorded and edited in GoldWave.  It came out kind of terrible last time I did that, but I’ll try again anyway.

Sound Effects: I bet you can guess this one.

For timelapse: I will be using Keeyai’s Chronolapse.

Will be listening to: Some combination of an exciting Pandora station and my 8bitcollective favorites.

Desk: I’ve moved since the last Ludum Dare!

Sauce Control: Mercurial, pushed to Bit Bucket.

Twitter: ExciteMike

Interweb pagesite: http://excitemike.com/

Rules Question: How would people feel about a game connecting to internet radio for music?  I probably won’t do it this time around, but I’m thinking about it for future events.

Giant grid of screenshots from all 205 LD 17 games!

205 screenshots + LD logo

Here are some wallpaper-sized versions:

• 640 x 480
• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 0960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1600 x 1200

EDIT: These ones add some space for your task bar.

• 640 x 480
• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 0960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1600 x 1200

It’s about that time where I start thinking my game idea might be crap!  I was thinking I’d have you grabbing passing ships and using them as weapons to throw at other monsters, but now I feel like this guy just wants to swim around and have a good time.  Probably chase things around the cluster of islands.

Baby Leviathan squirming around.

demo/status page here

I guess we’re about three and a half hours in, and it turns out I spent all that time on just the idea!

Thought it might be cool to share my whiteboard:

The accel curve drawn there is pretty much exactly the worst I could have picked for hard-to-explain reasons.

Title ideas.

It doesn’t really communicate the game idea well

At this point I think I’m going to try a kind of offbeat movement scheme combined with grabbing and throwing things.  I’m not sure those things combine well, but I guess I’ll find out!

Framework:  This Stego AS3 framework thing that I’ve accumulated over the last several months:  http://bitbucket.org/excitemike/stego/

IDE: FlashDevelop. compiling with mxmlc.

Music: I’m thinking WarioWare DIY, then recorded and edited in GoldWave.

Graphics: A copy of Photoshop CS 1 which as far as you know was obtained completely legitimately.

Sound Effects: I bet you can guess this one.

Will be listening to: Switching Pandora between a DragonForce station and a station based on music from movie montages (on which the Transformers: The Movie (animated) soundtrack comes up often! ).

For timelapse: I will be using Keeyai’s Chronolapse on account of it’s awesomeness.

Desk:

The Brachiosaurus will be relocated before the compo begins.

Refridgerator:

In case you wondered whether I like bottled water.

Additional foodstuffs:

crunchy munchies

Inspiration:

I should be playing the GameCube version with bongos.

Projector + FC Twin + Super Game Boy + Game Boy Donkey Kong = Heaven!

Sauce Control: Mercurial, which I love.

Twitter: ExciteMike

Favorite Dinosaur: Microraptor gui

And actually I may use Unity, depending on what kind of ideas I get once the theme is announced, but the above is most likely.

I need to get a decent camera.  The webcam built into the cheap laptop is kind of a pain to use.

Late

I gave up on my original idea and didn’t think I was going to do a mini-ld game this time, but then suddenly within a couple hours of the deadline I decided to whip together something bad but playable.

PLAY ONLINE

On a happier note, I did make four games this weekend!  The other three were for Klik of the Month Klub.  over here.

Edit:  Timelapse!

The Greatest Game in the World... Tribute

A clone of Gameboy Donkey Kong (a.k.a Donkey Kong ’94).

(there’s no winning or losing, just platforming around and watching the levels change)

compo entry page

PLAY ONLINE

Fixed version for folks without a sound device

Source code

Timelapse

Super Game Boy changed my life.

Progress:  Spent WAY too effing long in Photoshop.  It’s way too easy for me to get distracted tweaking pixels.  I have an intro that I’m really happy with, but no gameplay at all yet!  Time to focus on that now.  Definitely NOT time to play my copy of Umihara Kawase DS that arrived yesterday.  Focus, Mike.

I will soon be spending Christmas vacation in a land where non-dial-up internet access is somewhat hard to come by.  So to prepare, I have downloaded offline copies of almost all the games.  Now that I’ve put that together, it occurs to me that maybe others would like that?  If one giant download of (almost) all the LD16 games would be useful to you, you can get all 327 delicious megabytes of it here.

I think there are only 2 games that I couldn’t get working offline copies of.  One was Linux only and the other looked like it would be nontrivial to steal from Kongregate.  For all the games whether I could rip them or not, the folder contains shortcuts to that game’s page on ludumdare.com.

EDIT:  Link fixed.  Thanks, Jonny D!

I have a new wallpaper!

Keep doing square numbers, guys!

I was really happy with my game from the previous Ludum Dare.  Not so much this time.

The idea here was to have a bunch of teensy games showing a variety of game mechanics and have them arranged in a big grid you can browse.  Unfortunately I didn’t get working on the actual games until very late in the compo.  Somehow I managed to lose a lot of time on the UI for browsing them even though it doesn’t look that complicated.

I guess I knew going into it that the idea was going to be terribly hard to pull off in 48hrs, but stupidly kept going with that idea instead of the others I had.

I guess I still finished a playable, silly platformer with five levels in 48 hours, and that’s still an accomplishment. 

I look forward to reviewing the timelapse once I put it together and take a look at how the time was really spent.  Should be educational.

Official Entry Page

Play Online

Timelapse

Source Code

Framework declaration:

So you guys can keep me honest, I just put the current version of the crappy framework I’ll be using up on BitBucket:  http://bitbucket.org/excitemike/stego/

I’ll be using that, FlashDevelop, Photoshop, Sfxr, and maybe this.

I cannot wait to start!

Oh hey!  If I make a blog post, then people will actually have a place to comment on the game!

Latest upload of Blow Up Wikipedia is here.

PLAY ONLINE

This is a post-compo version where the game is more like what I actually meant to make.  The original and post-compo versions are marked as such on the game’s page.

It’s like some weird mashup of a broken typing tutor and Space Phallus (NSFW!  Play it at home!).  Only mine has no genitalia.  Well, depending on which Wikipedia articles it uses.