After about two weeks of development, Dusk Software is ready to announce our October Challenge game, Aegis!

Aegis is the in-development title of our upcoming tower defense variant. Gameplay focuses on deck building between maps to prepare and setup which towers and effects will be available in game. Cards are acquired through in game currency awarded at the end of maps as well as drops from boss creep.

While the game isn’t close to being done yet, we have put up an alpha build on our website and added a donation button. We’ve already received well over $1, so I figure that it counts.

Here is a heavily cropped screenshot of our Paypal account page as proof:

Here’s a link to the Ludum Dare entry page. And I’ve got an embedded video right here:

(Yes, I know everyone hates Vimeo, but YouTube just makes a giant mess of my lovely pixel font.)

Dusk Software consists of:
– Me! (fydo)
– Ken
– Ted

As always, thanks a bunch Ludum Dare!

I dunno if anyone cares, but for the guitar enthusiasts in the compo, you might enjoy a tab of the song I made for Island Rescue.


/ = Slide
~ = Vibrato

A few more fun things going on here. Looking forward to spending tomorrow polishing things up. Fun times!

As per usual, I started working on art stuff to begin with.
The water line along the bottom is fun. It’s a bit of a cheap graphical trick, but I hope it brings the sensation that the tide is rising.

Hope everyone is having lots of fun!

Got my SNES gamepad to (hopefully) get joystick stuff working in the game.

Got my Line 6 GuitarPort so I can hook up my guitar to the computer for cool recording stuffs.

The gold box to the left of my monitor is a Retrode that I won in a naming contest. Fun!

Oh, and yes, I am using an old fan grill as a coaster for my now-empty glass of orange juice.

(for those who don’t get it, here is a helpful link with some info on the meme)

The good

• I actually finished this time! The last Ludum Dare I was in (Roads), I did not finish due to some unfamiliarity with AS3, among other issues and time constraints. So, yay for finishing!
• Even though I did suffer through a short internet outage, I managed to make good use of that offline time to work on some pixel sprites for the game, which really helped to set the artistic “vision” for Cave Dangerous.
• First time using Visual Studio in a compo, and it was quite enjoyable. Well, except for some major deployment issues (see below)

The Bad

• Originally planned to do something in 3D, but was feeling uninspired facing the modeller. Also, a quick test revealed my .obj loader was (again) not working correctly. So, scrapped that idea.
• As with every platformer I’ve made for a compo, I spent too much time tweaking / fixing the jumping and collision code. I think in the future, I’ll see about preparing some basic tile-based collision code ahead of time so I can focus more on the actual game.
• This was my first time trying Visual Studio with a compo entry, and it was very enjoyable up until I had to package it up to release it. I ended up almost pulling my hair out in frustration (why do I have to package a C++ redistributable? argh!). A website that I found (here: http://llbit.se/?p=19) explains pretty much exactly what happened to me. I ended up using mingw32 to compile the exe, which worked perfectly. Sheesh.
• Didn’t have enough time to add an explosion sound effect for the bomb. Apparently this is what most people complained about (aside from the length of the game) judging by the comments I got from the ratings.

As another “behind the scenes look”, here are some pics of the miner before I settled on the final image:

I spent a bit of time near the beginning setting up an MVC in the code, but towards the end it kind of fell apart, which is what I was expecting.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with the game. I wish I had more time to work on sound and add some music. Of course, it would have been nicer to spend more time on expanding the levels and caves too. As you might be able to guess, I had originally planned being able to buy and aquire different items, including different pickaxes, etc.

In retrospect, the game turned out quite a bit like La-Mulana, which totally wasn’t my intention. Oops.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! It was certainly fun to make. I love Ludum Dare.

Hooray for Ludum Dare!

(New screenshots coming soon from me)

Still LOTS left to do … sigh.

Also, I’m trying to think of an awesome name. I’ll come up with something.

Last night I got a level loader done that’ll read data from a bitmap file to construct a tile-based level. Still no screenshots yet… I hope I can get my vision into something playable before the 48 hours are up. Ho ho!

My Internet was down for about 4 hours this morning. Yikes! It actually helped me focus on working on the sprite. Woo.

Hope everyone is having a great time with their LD entries! Bam pow.

Anyways, if you’re curious to see how far I got with RACING FEVER, check out this page:
http://fydo.net/projects/ludum-dare-13-entry

I totally intend to keep working on it. As you tell, there is no way to actually complete a race. Also, the computer-controller cars are morons.
Some friends on IRC also pointed out that the garage menu controls should be a little more responsive too.

Anyways, good luck to everyone else involved! :D

I was hanging out on IRC with some pals when Bleck, DrPetter, and I decided to have a fun little “microLD”, where normal LD rules apply, but you get only 6 hours to develop your game. It’s quite flexible in that you can choose which 6 hours you want to use. (Hooray for the honor system)

There is an added twist that I announced the theme at least a day before everyone started, so you got to think about what you wanted to make.

The theme is/was ‘Utopia’.

Here are the final entries: (From what I’ve heard, I’m still waiting on entries from philhassey and mjau)

Bleck – Snowtopia -  http://www.omnisu.com/files/snowtopia.zip
DrPetter – Utopia – http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/drpetter_utopia.zip
Fydo – Paradise Gone – http://fydo.net/programming/ParadiseGone-fydo-microLD1.zip

I certainly had a lot of fun making my entry. I had about 2 hours to kill on a busride a few hours before I started developing the game, so I planned it all out on paper. It worked out surprisingly well, in my opinion. Post your comments!

And of course, it’s not too late to participate. Since this isn’t really an official compo by any means, feel free to set aside 6 hours of your choice to make a game and put a link in the comments. Hooray!