That was a quick finish… Woke up Sunday morning (contest ends Sunday evening for me, I think 6pm?) with 9 levels done and no sound.  So I ate waffles, opened up SFXR for some sound effects, and cranked out one more really obnoxious level.  Then I submitted at 10:30AM!  Game is done.  It has all the classic Towlr elements, I believe, along with 10 madcap levels, two different endings (well, three I suppose if you count just losing), and surprises galore.  Or a few surprises, whatever.

Cool to finally finish an LD entry for the first time in years!  And I’m happy with it basically… it’s not the most amazing game, but it contains an amazing amount of content (well, mechanics anyway), not just a bunch of levels of the same thing, but all different gameplay.  I’m very curious to see how anybody other than me plays it.  I think I will get many complaints, and I’m already amused imagining what they will be.  Enjoy my Towlr!  Time to get back to my day job.

Oh, P.S. here’s the entry: TOWLDR

Towlr making is fun! I am going to bed with my game 90% done.  I think I want to make one more level, and I need a lot of sound effects, but that’s it.  I have a title, an ending, and 9 levels with a wide variety of entertaining scenarios to blow your mind.  Unfortunately I can’t really show any of it without spoiling things… this is a Towlr after all.  Makes me pretty bad at this community thing, but I’m having fun and I’m glad to be making something new and small and ridiculous instead of continuing my months of grinding away at Growtopia (click it, love it, buy some IAP).  I still have to go back and grind on it Monday and for the rest of my life, but for this weekend, it’s party time.

I think the difficulty still needs some adjustments, but it’s certainly a minimalist game!  I’m working on TOWLDR, because a Towlr (http://towlr.com) is exactly what this theme demands.

I’m actually only posting so I can see myself on the world map!  I think I’m in for this LD, but I have SERIOUS deadline issues with the game I really need to be making, so I don’t know.  It’s LD24, on the 24th, how can I miss that?  Plus I hear that LD sold out and now they’re giving out money to people, and possibly strangling endangered animals too.  That’s just the word on the street.

See you there!  Or not!  I want to!

The theme better not be Abandoned, that’s just stupid.

As always, I’ve blogged my progress at http://hamumu.com/journal.php instead of here!  This time though, there’s also my live stream at http://www.livestream.com/hamumu .  If you’re wondering what good that is now that it’s no longer live, you can still watch it!  It’s recorded and clickable from there.  Granted, that makes it a *touch* longer than the usual timelapse, but it’s there if you want to see for some reason.  Some parts may be missing, some weird issues at times.

I’m livestreaming my participation, at http://livestre.am/JHYU.  Or trying to.  I am going to miss a big chunk of Saturday, so we’ll see what happens!  Good luck with [THEME NAME]!

BECAME…

Robot Wants Kitty was my entry for LD16 – Exploration, a simple Metroidvania game shrunk down to LD proportions.  I made it in Flixel (Flash library), so just as an experiment, I thought I’d put it up on FGL and see if I could get any sponsors.  I first spent about a week enhancing it a bit (the big upgrade was music by DrPetter!).  Then the sponsor search exceeded my wildest expectations!  I got a decent deal, and a lot of interest, and (foolishly) signed up to do 2 sequels with the same sponsor.  With such a popular game, I could’ve done much better putting the sequels out for bidding individually.  I just didn’t have that faith in my game!  Remember kids, believe in yourself!  And knowing is half the battle!

You can play the post-LD version on Kongregate among many other places (like Hamumu!).  This all led inexorably to a pile more Flash games which made me a lot more money than I had been making in downloadables, so it was like a complete renaissance in the way I do business.  Everything’s different now!

Then eventually during my heady flash-making days, Raptisoft approached me about porting Robot Wants Kitty to the iPhone.  I was happy with that, but what I totally didn’t expect was that he was going to massively expand the game, as you see in the screenshot.  I expected a straight port, but what we’ve got is obviously totally upgraded visually, has six levels instead of one, and has a built-in level editor, with user level sharing to come soon.  It’s done awesome on iTunes in the week it’s been out, hitting New & Noteworthy in the Adventure category (not overall… yet), and so far garnering 21 five-star reviews, one 4-star, and three 1-star (people who couldn’t get it to run for whatever reason).  Go pick it up, the best $0.99 you’ll spend today!  I didn’t have much to do with creating it, other than making four of the levels and obviously the original concept.  Raptisoft really made something great out of it.

It looks like I’m not because I’m doing it on my site.  To witness my fabulous and unstoppable and sure-to-finish and no-way-going-to-fail progress, check out http://hamumu.com/journal.php .  Thank you for your examining.

I wrote a post on my blog with about 20 of them!

Hamumu Journal

Steal whatever you like, or mock them.  Whatever floats your flagpole.  I just see lots of people always saying they have no ideas, and this theme is chock-full of ideas for me, so here they are.

There it is!  Can’t believe it’s been 20 entries.  Can’t believe how long it took to make the collage!  Actually, I don’t think I ever submitted Space Cruise, but I was making it for the contest, and I still have it partly done, so there you go.  If you want to check out any of these for some reason, visit www.hamumu.com and search and search until you find them!  A couple aren’t available there, but those are some really really bad ones.  My first one goes back to LD#0 – Indirect Interaction (in 24 hours, not 48!).  Beat that, n00bZ0rz.

Credit to Jovoc for the artsy hexagonal layout which I stole.

I realize this looks like my only journal entry for the whole compo, so click here to see the actual deal.  I really did do some!  Not a lot, just some screenies yesterday, and I’m about to do one more today, which shouldn’t be too tough with 4 hours left to go.  LDs are exciting, but draining.  I am ready for rest and WoW now.

For the sake of German keyboards, Y now works as Z also.  That’s the only change, shouldn’t affect judging in any way, except that now I won’t be berated by angry Germans.  If you are an angry German, and want to consider my ignorance in your rating, pretend Y doesn’t work, because that is in fact the state the game was at deadline, and that would be fair.

(you say baby, have you got enough gas?)

Well, today was a huge bust.  I worked a little in the morning as my previous entry detailed, then it was off to a very distant lunch (about a 1.5 hour drive).  All told that chewed up 6 hours, after which I was home with a big headache and very tired, so another 2 hours spent napping.  Which of course made me feel worse, so popped some tylenol, ate some cake, and gradually recovered not doing much for a couple more hours.

At long last, I did some work for about 2 hours maybe, and now the game is basically what it needs to be, minus most of the content!  You begin with no abilities, and you can pick up the jump ability as advertised and use it.  The screenshot shows the second power, Shoot.  That’s not actually implemented at all.  Also, the enemies are harmless (but the evil OUCH zone is quite lethal!).  There’s no money to collect and spend on these powers like I wanted, but I think I’ll skip that, so I can just spend tomorrow making the actual game content.  Should be fun and easy!

Flixel seems quite limited in what sort of game it will manage, but it makes that particular type of game real easy.  If you wanted to make anything but a side scroller, I think you’d have to fight it so much that you’d be better off just making your own code from scratch.

It’s saturday morning, and thanks to Flixel doing pretty much everything for me, I have a robot rolling around and jumping (gonna have to take that away soon before he can earn it back).  I like his run/roll animation, it really expresses his desire to have a kitty.  The scary space monsters are actually just solid blocks right now.  I guess implementing them is next.

After extensive fidoodling around with Flixel, I have managed to make it so it has a .raw image embedded into the SWF which it reads and uses as map data.  Voila!  Now I will be able to edit my map in Paint Shop Pro as is the standard among my people.

I don’t think there’s much going on with this theme. I expect a whole lot of games where you don’t do anything but move around.  Blah.  The best thing I could think of off-hand that would still be a fun thing was a Metroidvania game.  After all, those are all about exploring the place, and the beauty of it is that as you go, you get new abilities to increase the area you can explore.  I also thought a game where you travel through time and explore the same place at different times would be delightful, but I want to actually accomplish something instead of wallowing in confusion, so no time travel here.

So I have chosen to make Robot Wants Kitty, where a robot arrives at Space Station Exploratio because he heard there was a kitty there, and robot wants kitty.  He initially can do nothing but move left and right, and he needs to collect coins to spend at Vendotrons on purchasing movement upgrades like the handy jump ability.  To make life remotely interesting, I plan to have enemies you kill to earn these coins, but you’re probably going to want an offensive ability first.  So that’s the whole plan.

I am trying out Flixel for this (hence it’s in flash).  As of this writing, I have completed the Flixel “Hello World” tutorial, so I’m just flying along with greatness.

I will miss a large chunk of tomorrow, so I probably will fail miserably, but doing anything more than thinking on Friday night (in my timezone, the contest is Friday 6pm to Sunday 6pm) is more than I’ve ever done before, so I have a headstart!

Behind The Dumb Episode 7 is available now!  Thanks to the handy extended voting, it is available before voting is over!  Of course, again, I filmed it all during the 48 hours, but didn’t edit and release it anywhere close to that time, so probably not valid for voting.  But I hope you enjoy seeing what kind of sandwich I ate, in one of the most epic cliffhangers since Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger.

Behind The Dumb Episode 6 is out at last!  It’s the first half of my timelapse and journal for LD14!  Check it out.  You don’t need to rate it, because while I did FILM it all during the weekend, I certainly didn’t have it all edited and ready by then.  And the second half won’t be out until voting is over anyway.  Still, it should be amusing to some.

Short Fuse 2: The Escape

Here’s my LD14 entry.  It’s flash, so just click here to enjoy! Source is at this link.

I’m sad that I am going to get stomped in the Journal category, considering I spent the whole weekend documenting the development in great detail for my Behind The Dumb video series. But no way will I have that edited in time, so I’ll just take my lumps, and you be sure to check that out when it does come out next weekend (a different episode is coming out this week). I’m also recording a timelapse (hi timelapse! You are watching me type this!), but I’m just going to incorporate that into the episode too.

Two Roads is my entry for LD13 – Roads. It’s extremely simple to play, and you’d have to be sick in the head to not have the most fun ever in your whole life enjoying its extremely innovative and immersive gameplay.

POST COMPO UPDATE!  This is not cheating!  You can go ahead and download the 17mb compo edition below, or you can be smart and download the 5.4mb post-compo edition instead!  It’s the exact same in every way, except all the sounds are changed to OGG files, and all the images have been converted to 256 color.  The only code change was to change “wav” to “ogg” in the sound loading code.

Win32 download: http://hamumu.com/goods/ludum/tworoads.zip (17mb! It must be good!)

Obviously I slacked off a lot this weekend, since this is only my second log entry… oh well. I hope you enjoy my game! It was a unique experience creating it.