Well, I sort of have a design planned out for my game, so I decided to take out a pen and start drawing. Here’s what I sketched up in the past 5 minutes.

Notice the beautiful asset list: brainwave, eyes, hand, mouth, and nose. A more delightful art asset list I have not seen!

OK, with 33 hours remaining, hamburger’s finally going to start thinking about getting started.

“Advancing wall of doom” is a pretty morbid theme, guys. I feel compelled to make a game about the original wall of doom, that one that is advancing upon us all – death, of course!

I picture myself on my deathbed, waves in my head slowly shrinking to whispers, then nothing. I have a little bit of energy left in me, but not enough to run the whole machine of my body. Should I focus it in my eyes, to see my loved ones around me? Or in my ears, to hear what they’re saying? Or in my hands, to feel when they hold them? Or should I focus all my energy inside my head, to keep those waves alive?

Is this a game? I hope so. I’m going to try to run with it. If you have any suggestions, please make them.

Here it is!

It’s lovely!

Play it here.

This game is sort of like Frogger, except you can’t move backwards. Enjoy!

I had a lot of fun with this. I wanted to do a couple more sets of levels with other Kandinsky paintings, but I didn’t have time.

Coded in ActionScript 3 + TweenLite, with art stolen from Wassily Kandinsky, and animations created in the Flash CS3 API.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

Well I spent a couple more hours and got the basic functionality in. It’s actually pretty fun. And the artwork is beautiful of course, because it’s Kandinsky!

I’m doing all the animation in the Flash IDE rather than programatically, which I’ve almost never attempted before – so it’s fun, but I’m an amateur.

Two playable levels are up at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/OndrianFordrian_v01.html.

There is now a doodad, and the doodad moves forward. You can see it moving forward in the screenshot below. As you can see, the game is already looking completely beautiful!

Well, after a couple of hours playing old LD games (which tend to be amazingly good, btw), here’s my screwball idea.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

In this mashup, I intend to mash extra hard, almost beyond recognition. In other words, I will be interpreting my inspirations loosely.

In Only Forwards, the avatar is always moving forward and the player’s inputs cause the avatar to turn left and right. In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is either moving forward or not moving at all; input consists of exactly one key, the MOVE FORWARD key. The player’s goal is to move forward as much as possible.

In Mondrian, the visuals are inspired by the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian. In Ondrian Fordrian, the visuals are inspired by the Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky. Or who knows, once I actually have a game maybe I’ll go with someone else, someone whose work is more gamey, like Mondrian’s friend Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl art movement. I totally just looked all that stuff up on Wikipedia.

In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is a Kandinsky doodad attempting to traverse the frightening, bewildering Kandinsky miasma. His goal is to move forward along his curvy, Kandinskic path. Everything moves. Some of it pushes him backward, some of it can hurt him.

Never Look Back. This is the second (way more boring) title for this game.  Never look back, Kandinsky doodad. The past is past, and the only way is forward.

I will be working in Flash with AS3. I intend to finish the game this weekend, but it’s going to be meager, for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, plus the weather’s so damn nice.

And so my first LD entry comes to a close!

Play it at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/cryptidia.html. Also posted at Kongregate. 

I would describe this game as a cross between mad libs and the Spore creature creator. Emphasis on the mad libs. Everything is randomized, including the number of arms and legs and the position and rotation of everything. I didn’t get a chance to network it (I was going to hook up a database to pull in random parts from other players online), because the outside world intervened. So you’re just gonna to have to keep drawing all those arms and legs yourself.

If by some miracle you manage to create something attractive or at least entertaining with this ridiculous tool, please post screenshots! I doubt it will happen.

This game was coded from scratch in ActionScript 3, with art created in Flash and music performed with Anvil Studio. Full source code is available here. A windows executable is available here.

Enjoy!

My work in progress is up at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/cryptidia_v01.html.

Tomorrow I aim to make the game internet-enabled, and add what little bit of polish I can. The bizarre output is there to stay, though. This has got to be one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever worked on.

I have a very simple scaleable paint by pixel tool up and running, which is meant to form the core of my gameplay. Doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty on the inside, programatically speaking.

Finally getting started. See below a shot of my paper mockups from last night. Today I start my programming in AS3.

I decided to make a game about conceptualizing cryptids (unknown animals), so I’m trying to build a sort of semi-random animal generator as my game. I have a wants list and a needs list, and I’ll be lucky to make it all the way through the wants list.

Hello everyone, hamburger here. This is my first Ludum Dare, and I’ll be working in Flash.

I’m officially going to start thinking about the compo now, so my deadline is 8:21 PM EST on Sunday.