sponsored by caffeine! (Ya. Rly.)

TRAILER:

TEASER #1:

Basically this is another thing for a school presentation. This time about programming in general.

This is some sort of “documentary” about the general course of a Main-LD. Showing off how game-coding competitions work.

I’m gonna record a little bit of me talking/showing progress of my game/drinking water coffee etc. roughly every 2-3 hours. All this footage will then be made into a 20-40 minute long video.

Now comes the interesting part:

As I live in Austria, the video for the presentation will be in German.

But if anyone wants me to do so, I will also record separate English footage right after I recorded the German one. This could possibly be an interesting thing for the community, I think. I don’t know if anyone is interested, though.

So, if this sound interesting to you leave a comment/heart.

SHOW SOME SUPPORT ON TWITTER: Read and tweet – The long term for retweet! (Not really)

Sincerely,

- Folis (Richard)

I’ll go for a different setup now:

So, let’s see.

Language/Tool: Prefered LUA; else GML.
* Library: Löve2D

Music: FL Studio (Demo); Just because everybody liked the music ¬_¬
* Sound FX: SFXR

IDE to yell at when something’s not working: Notepad++

Other resources of staying alive:
* Coffee
* Exactly one pizza
* Water/Coke/Other Stuff to drink
* Crispy stuff
* Daily Walk
* Fun

Optional:
* Bugs

Let’s go for a success once again in my 5th LD. (It feels weird writing that..)

UPDATE: Now with more glittery stuff and an unnecessary (it’s still awesome, though) “Code your game in 48 hours!” on the side

I’m slacki… err.. listening to my CS teacher. And I just experimented with Photoshop a bit.

If green/black isn’t your style of colour you won’t like it.

The result is this: Wallpaperz!

It’s only 1280×1024, but it looks fine on 1920×1080.

If you want, use it, share it, love it. (If you do share it, please just link back to me.)

- Folis

As I’ve got 2 presentations at school, and I want to show the people some actual stuff.

This is why I wrote this little game: Pilot!

“Punkte” = Score – Feel free to post your score here :p

It’s about dodging asteroids. If you like arcade stuff, you should have some nice fun with it, else you may just jump out of the window. ^_.^

And as a little treat it features the music from my LD #21 Entry – Runner.. and his problems! – because everyone who played it, loved the music :p

VERY, VERY IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE:

I have to do a full citation!
Please send me an e-mail to richard.blechinger@hotmail.com, include your FULL NAME, OR your FIRST NAME and the FIRST LETTER of your LAST NAME, i.e “Johnny M.”, if you want to be kept anonymous.

That’s it. Now you can read the rest of the article.

You have 2 weeks.

Post anything you know about “indie”, answers to common questions, opinions, and more, I can convert any data.

• Do you think you could live off your hobby?
  Your definition of “indie” vs. “AAA”,
  Post-Mortems,
  Success (or terrible failure),
  Which language you use,
  Which IDE you prefer,
  Indie-Magazines,
  Articles,
  Games (Windows, or Flash/HTML5/Java),
  Examples of random code snippets (Commented if possible, please)
  ANYTHING.

It doesn’t have to be all too technical, because my classmates aren’t exactly computing geniuses. (Some random commented code snippets are okay, though. Just for showing them what’s going on behind the scenes)

Also, if I meet any of you on IRC while I’m slacking, I may ask stuff :p

There you go, bombard me, LD-Community!

Actually, he didn't. But.. *psssh!*

The HUD is coming along well, I need to make scrolling text for it, then inventory and stats.

Now, onto the adventurous cookie huntz!

Woah! Not-so-niftyness!

Welcome to moving squares and a HUD.. thingy.. I still.. need to properly implement!

The family friendly game!

There’s the player (green square), the walls (dark brown square), a chest (violet chest-square thingy) and the HUD (the rest of the screen)!

That’s it. Back to work.

It’s been a while.

Now I came up with something!

The simple idea is:

OMG!

A 2D Dungeon Crawler thing with a mix of RPG and puzzles!

Yeah. That’s about it. I’ll get started tomorrow.

I got a blog too.

http://folischallenge.tumblr.com/ <- That one

I'll update there, and maybe twice per week here.

That's it.

If you ask: “Why Ex-Dodge!?”

I got an answer for you.

Is this game Dodge?

You may say, no it isn’t, but know one thing. It actually is.

So what happened to it? To be honest, I don’t really know. It all started when I worked on the lighting. At first I wanted to do the actual lighting system, then I experimented with lamps to pick up and changed the graphics to be darker. Moment after moment, a game formed in my head. A not all to family friendly game. Then I started working on it and the outcome can be seen above. As this is definitely not Dodge anymore I changed the name to: Codename Orbit. This is only the temporary Codename if you get it..

And now. This is the update for this time.

- Folis

.. what do you like the most about making games?

Coding?
Level Design?
Drawing Sprites?

I’d be interested to know.

I even start: My favorite thing about making games is, that I can create whole worlds. If I can imagine something, I can build it! And that is the general fun for me. Coding is more or less just what I do to create those imaginations.

So let’s see. Err, okay, let’s put it this way.

I came up with a few things, which will change ‘Dodge – DYLC’ in a major way. Like major major major major minor major way.

I’ll give you a picture.

OMG, It's so new, it could be from the future! (It still only exists in future, though ;^^)

Now, I’ll explain.

First thing you’ll notice: It’s dark. That means it’s night. This is something that I need for the lights, which I need for the enemy behavior.

ENEMYS:

These lights are some sort of alarm. The enemy AI will be changed to shoot waaay faster bullets and they will only shoot if you come like 2 – 3 near them. If you hit a light source, all enemys in a certain zone (see ‘New Mapping’ below) will be alerted and their reaction zone will be increased by 3 – 4 blocks, which makes it harder to pass through the map. As you may get now, this adds a lot of stealth factor to the game (which will probably make McFunkypants quite happy. ;] ) and you can get through the map without being seen.

NEW ENEMY TYPES:

Sniper! (longer reaction distance!)
Scout! (Only able to attack you, when directly in front of him!

MOVEMENT:

Blocky movement was fine for the first demo ‘n’ stuff, but I want to change it to a fluid movement system, also with fluid movement for the crates, as it’s easier to push the crates without hitting the lights like this, because of that I can put more of them into one part, to make the level harder and the puzzles increasingly difficult. Also: If the player is pushing a crate, he’ll be moving slower.

NEW MAPPING:

This is a special thing I definitely want to pull off. If I pull it off correctly it should make the playing experience a lot smoother and it will offer the possibility of using items (See ‘Items’ below) to get to other regions from a point where you have been already. This adds more puzzle.

‘So, WHAT exactly is the new mapping?’, you may ask yourself. There is a simple answer. It’s one huuuuge map, which you can only see a portion off, as you advance on your way, the view will scroll along. It’s that simple.

ITEMS:

You may have noticed a hand symbol on the lower right corner. This is a crud beginning for an pick-up system, which will help you. At the beginning you’ll only be able to carry one thing at a time, until you find a bag or any other container you can take with you, which will increase your carrying limit by 3 (?) for a simple bag and by up to 9 (?) when you got a backpack.

Example items:

Flashlight: Will make you able to light up a certain area, but makes you easier to spot for the guards.
Screwdriver: Allows you to disable the big lights.
Crowbar: Allows you to open crates to search for items.
Knife: For sneaky assassinations.
Axe: For cutting down wooden doors. Will alert enemys within a certain distance.
.. and many more, I’ll see what I can come up with.

NEW TERRAIN FEATURES:

Hills!
Water!
Caves!

And that’s all I could come up with since yesterday. I hope you liked reading through that. Feel free to leave suggestions!

Also: A shout out to all people who gave me nice feedback on the 6-hour version of it. Special shoutout to McFunkypants for inspiring to turn this game into something great!

- Folis

P.S: If you went all: tl;dr: GO READ IT FOR F**KS SAKE!

P.P.S: http://folis-dev.tumblr.com/ – visit my blog!

I just saw my game in the first picture of the LD article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

That I approve ^^

Also: ‘Dodge – DYLC’ ad in the indie(magazine); at http://indiefunction.com/issue11.php

Forgot about that and am too lazy to edit.

What went right:
Music
Gameplay
Graphics
Submission Time
Food
IRC
Almost everything else.

What went wrong

The site server ^_.^ (I’m thankful to PoV and Phil for fixing it, though)
The variable ‘jump = 1′ x_.x

So, there, done.

[WARNING! INCOMING WALL OF TEXT!]

Woo! I was done for ages.

This was a fun LD, but also an too easy one for my taste..

“Escape” didn’t challenge me. It didn’t challenge me eet all.

Now, for the dev process of that is totally uninsteresting exciting!

DAY 1:

So, the first day started with me sleeping 2 hours longer than I wanted to. I hate snooze buttons. After I woke up I started my computer, got some breakfast, looked at the LD-Site – BAM – Idea for escape! Okay, to be honest, my idea was based on a cheap 1 hour game I made the day before called Jumper. It had the same concept. Without parallax. And that, children is, why it sucked ^_.^ So I drew a block. And another one. Then I wrote my 0815 Platformer Engine out of my head, removed the possibility of moving and failed to set it up correctly 5 times! All because of not adding the variable ‘jump = 0;’ to gravity code. I fail. Anyways. Later I added some graphics and started with the parallax base to give a feeling that you’re actually not just standing there, with a run animation sticked on your head. Now it was time for rocks >:D
They were also just animated things, but they moved at a speed of 4 and got generated by the player every 3 seconds. Then I added more graphics and the different screens for menu, game over and all that.

DAY 2:

Today was.. kinda lame, to be honest. I refined graphics, raged about the server melt, added one pick up, submitted as 7th person, and that’s about it.. Lame. L A M E! Then I went swimming. Fun. Really.

And yeah. Play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2494 (Links don’t seem to work properly, atm.)

So, if I submit my game first, I want an award. M’kay?

Submitted already, go play it now!

Look at this piece of art! Amazing, huh? (not really, but whatever.)

Intro!

BAM! ALMOST PARALLAX 'N' STUFF!

Also: Why did I use the same title with a different amount of time spent? :/