Allo, I’ll be working on a game for LD this weekend. I’m currently working on final projects for school (ucsc computer game design program) and will be driving from santa cruz to socal on friday morning. I’ll probably be on the road when the theme is announced, thankfully there’s no laws against designing and driving. I’ll be visiting a friend from out of state during the compo also, so I’ll be keeping it simple.

I’ll use either game maker or vc++/allegro/same skeleton project i’ve used for past LDs. That project and my past LD entries are at www.originowl.com.

On a related note, my final project for my assembly programming class was a shmup which ran on a Motorola HC11 microkit, using a two line by 16 char lcd display, 8 leds, 8 switches, and an interrupt button. I’ll get a video of the game.

Ciao! Good luck all!

Hello, I’m sorry for not writing more or getting on IRC during this LD.

Problems: Halfway through I got some bad news from a friend that took my attention for at least 12 hours and sapped my motivation once I did get back to finishing the game. I didn’t even try to name the game. There were other forces working against me during the compo. One was the unrelenting fury of the sun. A heatwave struck san diego with the start of the compo, and I was rarely in air conditioning. I did my best work under trees in breezy parks.  I was also without my mouse during the compo, something especially useful in the game maker development environment, even more so as this was my second GM game and I was learning new tricks.

Concept: When I saw ‘caverns’ it only took a few minutes before I was thinking down the rabbit hole from alice in wonderland. I remembered the scene (from the disney version) where she eats to grow big and drinks to shrink. I had the concept of using size altering items with cavernous environments to create situations that could be easy, difficult, or impossible depending on your size. I remembered how mario also grows by eating mushrooms, and so a mario-alice hybrid was born.

Didn’t get to: NPC’s to push a story: The characters and story would have come easily, simply by mixing elements from super mario bros and alice in wonderland. A grappling hook to swing over obstacles. Flame jets, pools of lava, more ice, button switches, and assisting NPC’s through rooms. Multiplayer co-op mode which would open access to new areas, the players would be able to stack.

Bugs: Any size larger than default will have to jump to clear the crest of a slope. Eating two mushrooms simultaneously causes player to embed in floor. Other occasional oddities. For these reasons, I included cheats, F to shrink (Fan), G to grow, R to restart. I was considering making F to shrink an item to obtain, this is based on elements from the original version of alice in wonderland (Lewis Carroll). However, it is possible to pass all levels without the use of cheats.

I’ve started playing the entries, good job everyone, impressive games. Thanks for playing.

Heyo, here tis:

http://www.originowl.com/Home/greencow-ld15

Finality.

Hiya! I’m planning to work on a game for LD15 this weekend. I’m on break from school, having just completed my first quarter at UC Santa Cruz in the game design program, and looking forward to moving into the dorms in a few weeks. I’m currently travelling around in my van, so I will be coding from friend’s houses or parks or coffee shops or wherever.

I will be developing using either C++ with Allegro and my toolkit/empty project: allegroblank or Game Maker.

I’ve just updated my library to include midi support through allegro functions. I will compose music using Anvil Studio.

Graphics using Allegro Sprite Editor and The Gimp.

Sound via SFXR and my microphone.

Good luck everyone!

Only a few months late! This is my first game maker game, conceptualized for miniLD8 (theme: mashup 2 past entries) and developed in about 48 hours over the past many months.

Link to my site with exe/source downloads and infos: http://www.originowl.com/Home/drsplodeyhead

I started making this timeline a few hours into LD14. I have imagined a program which would produce something similar, although I enjoyed the open ended prototyping and creative potential of doing it with pencil and paper.

ok so i’ve noticed the games with the least number of votes are python games that i haven’t been able to run because of some weird python error. i would imagine others have similar issues or perhaps don’t have python installed at all. i’ve just read something interesting, uninstalling old versions of python and reinstalling can help with issues. we’ll see how it goes..

wow it worked! i can finally run python games. one less stumbling block between me and games =]

python 2.6.2: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.2/

pygame 1.8.1: http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

Here we go!

Had to do a last minute downsample of the sound to make the zip small enough to upload =P

Posted to: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math

Download: http://www.originowl.com/Home/advancing-wall-of-math/LD14-greencow-awom.zip

screenshot:

Ok, so I’ve got a solid 8 hours in. 4:20am now so I’m pretty tired, going to get some sleep after this.

The game I’m making is Advancing Wall of Math and it’s set in outer space! Hmm, didn’t I do a math game before?

Well, this one is going to be of the shmup style, but you’ll be shooting numbers into ships to complete math problems. Here’s an advancing wall of doom if you consider 1+3=doom.

Hiya everyone =]

I’m about ready to make a game. I just updated my msvc blank project and allegro toolkit at the site where I’m publishing my games: www.originowl.com.

School has kept me very busy, 5 more weeks of math and english and piano and then I’m moving to UC Santa Cruz to do game design. Living on campus in the forest making games all the time, yeah I think I can handle that.

Good luck and love to everyone!

I will just apologize in advance, as the next level may shock and dismay..

Cannon Hearts Tower is my entry for miniLD6, the secondary theme is ‘LD12: The Tower’ and the tertiary theme is ‘miniLD5: Cover someone else’s game’. This is a cover of Sivart13’s game for LD12:  “Cannon Hates Tower”.

Use up and down to aim your cannon and hold space before releasing space.

This mini game will be used in the LDCollab framework as a single level, with the other miniLD6 entries.

This first version does not use score files.

The Max Score is 1000. Post your best score in the comments. I’ve gotten 650.

Download: http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/cannon-hearts-tower

Ok, so I’ve got an idea for a lil game that I’ll whip up tomorrow. It’s going to use The Tower secondary theme and will be brought to you by the color Pink.

I’ll be using my usual c++ with allegro.

Heyo! Game is complete!

Download From:

http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/buffalo-road

Hello,

Well I was supposed to be working on my compsci final project, but instead:

I’ve created a skeleton project for Allegro 4.2.2 on Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express (their free IDE).  This project includes a 2d graphics viewport, which can be scrolled/shifted, and a soundbox for your waves. There’s keyboard and mouse handling. There’s a sample background, sprite, and sound which obviously cannot be used in a Ludum Dare entry. These are just to make sure everything works right away.

This project and more info is here: http://sites.google.com/site/roboticarts/Home/allegro-blank-msvc-project

Post a comment if anything doesn’t work or if anything does work.

I’ll be in on this Ludum Dare like bees on flowers, ah sweet nectar.

I’m riding on the clouds of my notification last week that I’ve been accepted into the Computer Science: Computer Game Design major at UC Santa Cruz for Fall 09 =D Many moons of dreadful calculus and so forth and still some moons to go, before my schedule has courses like: Game AI, Interactive storytelling, 3d graphics and animation, game theory, and many game design studios. It’s going to be awesome. I’ll be on the LD4Ever and probably get some folks into it there.

Here’s to our grande olde arte of gaem maeking and a fun weekend!

hmm just whipped this up in 2 hours..hmm i’ve been meaning to make a sprite/animation editor to port to the ds, so i can use my ds to draw and animate sprites with the touchscreen. but, i think i’m done for tonight, and probably for the weekend. i’ve got tons of homework due as school started again last week and i lost the first week to burningman. ciao!

On 8/8/8 @ 8pm Ludum Dare 12 began, and the world would never be the same. The theme was ‘The Tower’, once again the theme ‘evolution’ was downed through natural selection. I didn’t find the theme very inspiring, but I was also brain drained from taking two finals earlier this day. I aced the classes though, so I was feeling good. One class was calculus, which probably influenced my choice of game.

I wasn’t having any particularly awesome ideas friday night, I wrote the basic “Hello, Tower” code. By the way here’s what I used:

Slow old laptop, which I’ve done all my coding on for about the past year. I like to write comfy code on the couch. Windows XP.

My IDE is Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2008, library is Allegro, graphics in Gimp.

Anyway I went to sleep without a decision at my usual 11pm, too tired to think. The possibilities I had come up with at this point:

1. Grow towering corn stalks by watering, but watering off center will cause corn to grow at an angle and eventually fall.
2. DeSprawler, pluck people from suburban houses and drop them in big city apartment towers.
3. A tetris game where you cleared equations instead of lines.

I woke up at my usual 8am, still not enthused about any idea. After lunch, about 1, I had decided on and started to code tetris. Now, I’m glad I finished it and I’m happy with it, but I could have come up with something more original, but so much time had already passed, I figured this would be simple to do in the time I had.

Also, funnily, I almost did a tetris clone for a previous LD. In LD6 (Light and Darkness) I started a game which involved working at a solar panel assembly plant. Solar panel parts would come on a conveyor belt, in tetris-like shapes (but I was going to have many more shapes) and you would pick them up with the mouse and drop them into a grid. The object was to fill as many grid cells as possible, but to make things trickier, the lights were slowly dimming, but completing a panel would raise the light level depending how much of the panel grid was filled. I didn’t finish that game in time, but now that I have a tetris engine, it would be pretty easy to finish it up to some extent. I put this into consideration when deciding on my LD12 game, which is actually not a good basis for the choice.

So, Saturday was making tetris for about 10 hours, rotation is the tricky part, I drew out all the pieces in all the positions on graph paper and typed in about 300 lines for this data. It’s all modularized so I could easily add more pieces and positions (I was thinking, tetris with 8 direction rotation, bricks on diagonal lines). I tested and got the numbers and symbols in the bricks and tried forming equations. They weren’t coming out too well, always the wrong symbols, I was thinking of giving up now because the game seemed overly frustrating. At this point there was not the tower of equations in the start. The game hardly had to do with the tower theme.

I played Notch’s entry: Breaking the Tower for at least an hour on Saturday night, too much fun, I had a few tabs of the game open and would leave them alone to just gather up resources while I coded. Note to self: there will be time to play other people’s games when they’re good and done after the compo ;] These web browser games are great, such easy distribution! This is exactly why I learned Java earlier this year, to distract people so I could win at LD ;]

Saturday night I went to sleep at about 1am, pretty much given up, woke up at 9am, lollygagged, at about 11am I decided I would go ahead and finish it. Sometime after this I came up with the tower idea, put that in, and now I was making equations! I got into it, making the equation checker, and I was doing pretty good on time. The game was a grid on a black screen with green text until about 4pm, 4 hours from the end, when I started making graphics. Making the background with help, code for level starting and sequencing, and tile graphics came pretty quick.

About an hour from the end, I remembered that in LD10.5, the game I submitted didn’t run for some people because I didn’t include any runtime libraries. So I researched that, found some libraries I hoped would work, but I didn’t actually get to test them on a virgin computer until after the end. This was because when I built the game in release mode, I got a screen full of tiles! One hour from finish and here’s the showstopper. Only happens in release, so I couldn’t debug easily, I was stumped. I narrowed it to some problem accessing the grid data, and switched _setstr to strcpy, and it was fixed! Whew, 15 minutes from the end and I almost didn’t have a game. Built my zip, wrote my post, uploaded and that’s a wrap. gg.

I’ve posted pictures of some of my meals, workspaces, kitties, and screenshots as the game was being made at a picasa album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/greencow/LudumDare12

qq l2+

Hola =]

Looks like I’ve finished with 10 minutes left..a new personal record! This is much nicer than finishing with 2 minutes left. Look at me writing this like I’ve got time ;]

I didn’t manage to have time for sound, which is probably good news, I was going to sing.

So Teenage Mathant Ninja Towers is a tetris clone, with numbers and addition, subtraction will be available in the retail version which hits shelves august 2012 for one million dollars MWAHAHAHA preorder now.

No, really, I could use the cash.

The file is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?njp8o70rl5u

Let’s hope this one works! I included some redistributable files from MSVC2008 in the zip.

Good luck! Looking forward to playing some of your games!

Edit: Drat, well I found a bug, at level 3 there’s minus signs in the tower, however the code for computing minuses isn’t in, so some equations at level 3 and above will not clear. Here’s a link to a zip with no broken minuses, in case you’re really getting into the game and want to play it past level 3, but this version is not to be judged!

http://www.mediafire.com/?w9ptefdxbzc

Hiya =] well I took two finals today, completing my summer semester. If my calculations hold, I’ll have an A in environmental biology and calculus 1 woot. This is a nice place to relax after a busy summer =]

Hmm I haven’t written code in months, guess I’ll use allegro with ms visual c++ express as before.

Good luck everyone, may the force be with you!

Tower Power!

Well, I haven’t done anything except moo at #ludumdare, and come up with a few ideas:

verse versus verse – noah vs moses using some quotes from: http://www.cracked.com/article_15699_9-most-badass-bible-verses.html as attacks.

triangle man versus particle man – from the good ol ‘particle man’ by ‘they might be giants’. simple fighting game, particle man is indicated by a magnifying glass and just can’t win.

? vs ? – type names for each player and the first google image search result for each name is the sprite used for that player.

I’m imagining these as basic ’street fighter 2′ type fighting games, with juwhich is among my least favourite genres, so I haven’t been too motivated to code anything. Triangle man would be easy and a bit comical, mehbe.

Well I’m drinking coffee so that’s a start.

Update: oops, thought I posted this yesterday. well it’s sunday morning and no code, so I wouldn’t expect anything from me.

Hiya =] well I didn’t really post anything here for LD10.5 although I was working on something. The theme was kittensweird/unexpected/surprise, and for that I came up with a cat&mouse game where you would play as a kitty stalking mice using line of sight and keeping quiet. There would also be a movable cheese to bait the mouse. I set out to make the game in a side view with 3 axis of movement, which is far too many axii for a .5 compo =/ To save time I was drawing sprites by hand and taking photos of rooms to use as backgrounds, but putting 3 dimensional objects to do line of sight with was a daunting task, it would need a level editor and would be better presented in 3d at that point, too much for one weekend. Oh yeah, and I was fighting off the sickness. pwnd. Here’s as far as I got:

Also, I won’t be doing the LD11. I’m going to be racing my mountain bike on the cross country course at the sea otter classic in monterey, ca. My laptop bike mount is a little heavy for racing joo know?

So just to give a bit of background behind the chemistry of my game, here’s the page I used for research:

http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/radical.htm

Basically, the creation of the material we know as vinyl is done by a chain reaction of monomers into polymers (polymerization) initiated by a free radical initiator.

If you have shockwave then this short video (from the above page) will demonstrate the process effectively:

http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/movies/peprop.htm

aka FreeRad

Whew gotta get this in!

3 level rushed release =/ more levels later!

found some free file hosting in the last minute, here’s the file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?20tipylt149

(Thanks Jach for offering ftp space)

more to come later, probably my next free day: Wednesday.

Edit: If the game gives an error message like “This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.”, you may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributable package, which can be downloaded from:
here