You can play this game in your browser (warning: sounds will play)

Concept:
It’s time for your final exam to graduate from your UFO school. Only problem is you were a complete slacker. You have no idea how to fly your ship. You have 3 minutes to impress your commander by destroying as many humans, cars, helicopters, tanks and jets as you can–or suffer the consequences!

All you can remember is to use the keys 1,2,3,4 and 7,8,9,0

Tools used:
* Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using my mouth and microphone and Audacity to process the sound effects. I composed the music loop in Reason.

Here is the latest flash build of my game (you have to click on the game before it will have key focus)

Starting to get collisions and scoring in.  Still need to implement time over conditions and enemy ramp up at various time points.  Need to get jets and tanks in now too.  You can get points now and be killed though.  Tons of balancing will have to be done once I get all the game elements in.  Oh and also hopefully add music, sounds, and more then rectangles for all the objects too! 9 hours left…

I wanted to finally post a link to a playable prototype of my flash game in progress.

Make sure to click on the flash game window to give it focus or the keys won’t work!

It uses all 8 control keys (1,2,3,4 & 7,8,9,0) and they are currently mapped to 8 random UFO actions right now.  WHY?  Because you are playing a slacker alien that wasn’t paying attention in your UFO Academy and now it is time for your 3 minute final exam to see if you graduate.  You slacked so much you have no clue how the crazy thing operates.  You’ll have access of four directions of movement, an energy shield, a death beam, and two different particle attacks.  You must try your best to figure out how to annihilate as many humans, cars, tanks, jets, and helicopters as you can to see if you pass.

Currently using boxes for object art, no collision detections or scoring yet, and I’ve only implemented humans, cars, and helicopters behaviors.  I’m quite happy with how they are moving around though.

This is like the fourth prototype I’ve worked on so far.  Things are going slowly today for me as I have been scattered between a few ideas while I hoped for one to spark my excitement.  I think I’ve finally got an idea I’m psyched about enough that I’m doing a bare bones playable version of.  Hoping the scope is right for the time remaining.  We shall see.

Start: February 19th, 2010 at 9PM EST (GMT-5)

End: February 21st, 2010 at 9pm EST (GMT-5)

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Mini LD 16 is fast approaching!

It will kick off this Friday, February 19th at 9pm EST (GMT – 5)

The theme of this competition is Constraints.

Major goal:

• To explore what game designs we are able to create given a certain set of arbitrary constraints

Minor goals:

• To have the games share a common control scheme
• To have the games share aspects of look and feel
• To have total designer freedom of genre and topic

I won’t be announcing the final constraints until this Friday at 9pm EST but I’d like to provide a teaser of some of the things you may encounter.

Possible constraints:

• Must work with a specific color palette
• Limited to specific control inputs/keys
• Music length limits (looping allowed)
• Numbers of sound effects
• Specific screen dimensions
• Sprite or game object size requirements
• Background graphics
• Text limits
• Levels / Waves / Rounds requirements

As I mentioned in my minor goals above–I have no intention of specifically limiting the topic or genre of the game you create. I want there to be at least that one axis of complete freedom for the designer as they work within the constraints.  I’m looking forward to this weekend–see you all soon!

EDIT: 9 pm Constraints posted

Hey there folks–I’m hosting the Mini LD for the month of February and I wanted to announce the date!  It will take place the weekend of the 19th-21st.  I’ll have more specifics as the date approaches of course.

EDIT Feb 16th: More information posted!

You can watch 36 hours of my game development on Angry Caverns compressed into 3 minutes here in my timelapse video on YouTube.

It was my first year doing a timelapse and I think I’m hooked.  So much fun to see the creative process!

Time to sleep soon too…

I’ve used the snazzy new uploader tool to submit my final version of Angry Caverns with 10 minutes to spare even!

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

Main menu

Level 5 of the final version

You can play Angry Caverns here in your browser.

ANGRY CAVERNS – by HybridMind – August 28th-30th, 2009
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 15’s 48hr game competition

Concept:

You are the angry caverns. You awaken one day to find many creatures living inside of you. This pisses you off. Destroy as many as you can.

How To Play:

• Click on the stalactites and bubbling vents to trigger your attacks.
• You will have limited time on each level
• Chain attacks for big combo points
• Glowing creatures are worth more bonus points
• Bigger completion bonuses for more creatures killed
• Supports online leaderboards!

Tools used:

Coded in Flash / ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using Dr. Petter’s sfxr for sound effects. I composed both music loops in Reason.

Got Feedback?

Feel free to email me at dave [at] hybridmind.com or visit my blog and leave me a comment.

I’ll be working on this game some more so any thoughts or suggestions while be taken into consideration for the post-compo version! Thanks for playing and I hope you have a good time with it!

I’ve finished plugging in a bunch of sound effects for Angry Caverns and you can hear and play the result here (Flash)

Now I’m off to use Reason to compose a quick main menu loop and at least one level loop…

Then it will be time to generate some more levels than 1  !

EDIT: If anyone plays and the sounds are too loud / soft / annoying.. feel free to let me know!  Thanks 

I’ve got another playable billed uploaded along with another gameplay video for the passively curious:

Play version 0.3 here (Flash)

Watch gameplay video of version 0.3 here (YouTube)

A suitably themed main menu

Concept:
You are an extremely angry cavern. You awaken one day to find many creatures living inside of you. This pisses you off! You have a short amount of time on each level to use your cavern weapons to destroy as many creatures as you can. Kill multiple creatures with one attack to earn combo points and kill rare bonus creatures for extra score! Compete online with global leaderboards.

Controls:

• Use your mouse to click on your weapons (stalactites, geyers, etc.)
• Kill as many creatures as you can within the time limit.
• Kill all the creatures for a big bonus!

A few more screenshots with captions after the READ MORE…

(more…)

ok Ok.. so they are still rather stick figure like.. BUT they switch comically between running and walking and change directions too.  You can watch a gameplay video of version 0.2 here.

At this point I’ve implemented 2 different enemies (bats & cavemen), 2 different weapons (stalactites & geysers), a combo system, tracking of stats like base level score, bonus score, and reporting back on a level over screen.

Many things still to do of course but my plan is still holding so far of trying to get the bulk of all implementation finished before generating levels and upgrading the graphics.

You can play version 2.0 here in your browser too.

As the remnants of Hurricane Danny thrash against the windows on it’s way out to sea I’ve finished with my dinner and half-finished with my beer.  Been working on the game now since 5am EST and it is now almost 8pm.  I had way too much coffee a few hours ago and in some attempt to bring my nervous system’s ballast back in line I’m having a Corona. 

The game is going well so far.  Angry Caverns is starting to be fun and I’m starting to refine some of the ideas and mechanics with all the time I’ve spent playing it.  I hope I can get a bunch more finished tonight before I have to crash though.  As soon as I start nearing this point in the competition (usually about 15 hours of dev in) I start getting a little loopy and distracted.  If I can just stay focused for as long as possible I can lay the ground work for a productive day tomorrow.  Well.. back to the game dev!

Thanks to some help from Gilvado I figured out this whole CamStudio business and uploaded my first ever gameplay vid to YouTube! 

It’s 20 seconds of the current state of Angry Caverns

I’m tuning some of the bat physics now.. which reminds me– ya know one thing I love about doing game development?  It’s getting to say things like “I’m tuning bat physics…”

Hopefully I’ll be back soon with more exciting developments.

Alright– finally have my initial proof of concept demo up and available for any curious souls to try out.  It isn’t too exciting yet but it will show you the initial inklings of what I’m going for anyway.  It’s Flash so you can run it in your browser.

Basically this is a test level here with 4 stalactites, 3 steam geysers, and 6 flying bats.  I am enjoying the bat movement at this point.  Each time you play the game the cavern levels will have the same configuration of weapons for your use.  What will change is some slight variables on the initial speeds and directions of the enemies in the cavern.  The timer will likely be going away as now each cavern level has a limited number of weapons for you to use.  You use a cavern weapon by clicking on it with your mouse.

I hope to support interesting combos and other funny events perhaps to help your score and experience of the game.

Today my main goal is still to get all the behind the scenes engine working with my levels, get all the enemies moving correctly in the various levels, and finish coding all the weapon functions and effects.  That way tomorrow I can spend as much time as possible on bringing the graphics up to speed beyond the rapid primitives I’ve made everything here in.  My plan is to have the game be fun before spending anything more then the bare minimum on graphics because the game is what matters in the end to me.  Especially if I want to keep working on anything post-compo I’ll be far more motivated to improve graphics and polish if the actual game is fun! 

Controls:

Click on the bubbling steam geysers or the stalactites at the top of the cavern with your mouse to trigger them.  Steam geysers work like a short range shotgun at the moment so wait for the bats to be near.  Stalactites fall so you need to time them right with the bats movement.  100 points per bat.  Max score of current demo is 600 points…

My pot pie has finally finished cooking.  Luckily I had a few CheezIts so I didn’t collapse before it was ready:

After this hot meal on a dreary rainy day here south of Boston it’ll be back to work on the Angry Caverns.

6 hours of development so far and progress continues on my game…  thought I’d post a few early screenshots.  I’m working to get the first playable level done so I can continue messing with making the mechanics fun.  Doing bare minimum art as the lumpy bats will testify to:

Stalactites, Geysers, and Bats now spawn.  The bats have a funny animation right now which I think will make them enjoyable to watch flap around as you try to eliminate them.

Rough working main menu too.

Well, I’m stalling out on productivity right now because I am starving.  I have a chicken pot pie in the oven cooking but it won’t be ready for another 30 minutes so I’m powering on best I can.

I’m really trying to focus on getting the earlier playable and fun parts of this game coded.  Building out primitive menu systems and game framework logic so that I won’t have to mess with it later.  I have implemented the timing bar, level counters, and scoring widgets.  My hope is that once I get the basic ‘level format’ working I can do 5 rough levels with very basic art today.  Then tomorrow can be spent on improving the art and adding music and sound.

Yes.. plural.  Been refining my idea a little.  I think I want to keep it more fun and interesting by making hopefully 5 different cavern levels.  Each with a slightly different theme and weapons and targets.  Each level will have a short time limit (1 minute?) in which you’ve tried to use the levels weapons (stalactites, steam vents, rock falls etc) to take out any life forms.  It will be a score based game tuned to encourage compelling replays and leaderboard competition.

I am thinking of some various themes for the cavern levels which are like 1920s bootleggers, 1700s pirates, 2000 teen hangout, 20,000 BC cavemen/critters, far future theme.

Potential Targets in the above themes:

• creatures (sprinkled throughout all themes…?)
  • bats
  • centipedes
  • lizards
  • fish
  • bears
  • wolves
• humanoids
  • teens (doing drugs? hanging out? contemporary theme)
  • cavemen (20,000BC theme)
  • explorers (going from A to B? contemporary theme)
  • pirates (after their treasure 1700s theme)
  • criminals (whiskey bootleggers (jugs / barrels with xxx, 1920s theme)
  • spacemen / aliens (future theme?

I’m excited about this game so far.  I think that with the variety of each cavern level having a different configuration of weapons layouts, path layouts and creatures with a unique theme it will be an amusing and humorous game.  Now I just have to see how much content I can pull off in the compo time limit.  I will attempt to get one playable theme first in case that is all I manage to pull off.  I’m thinking I’ll go for 20,000 BC wrapper first because I can do many cave creatures as well as humorous cavemen for targets.

Gonna writeup my game idea that sort of synthesized while I slept last night.  I feel the fun and scope of this game will be something I can pull off in 48hrs in Flash.

What I’ve got so far:  You will literally be playing as a cavern in an action / shooting gallery type game.  Your weapons will be stalactites which you will click on to let drop.  They will regrow and be various sizes as well.  You will also be able to click on steam vents on the floor that will shoot up a rush of hot vapor.  These will also have a recharge rate and various sizes perhaps even growing in various spots as the cave floor changes across game rounds.

You will be attacking against all manner of cave life, native and alien.  There will be the usual bats, snails, blind fish etc as well as various human archetypes one might find in this genre.  The lost teen(s), the hiding criminal, the cave explorer, the national geographic expedition etc.  Eventually if you incur enough rancor with the outside world you will be visited by the demolitions expert who will attempt to blow you up by placing charges.

I want to keep this in the realm of action/arcade instead of defense genre.  I think it will be more fun to interact with the cavern and very analog based ‘reload’ concepts (like watching the steam recharge in the vents and watching the stalactites regrow from the ceiling) versus a ‘recharge bar’ artifice.

Left to figure out is just overall cave layout(s) and round / difficulty escalation.

I’m picturing a really cool looking drippy cavern. The drips could even help with guiding the aiming of your rocks and stuff by helping lead your eye at the correct gravity setting to hit your targets.  I’m thinking mouse based click-controls to launch various attacks but I don’t want it to be a click heavy game.

I think the humor element could be high in this game as well if I handle it right.

Here is a current rough mockup for color reference:

Alright– so my food photos won’t win any beauty contests but between the bagels and the coffee I’ve got all the fuel I need for the next few hours to keep working on my game mockups.  I got about 5 hours of sleep last night after waiting up for the theme.  Before going to bed I wrote 4 game ideas down and slept on them.   Waking up at 5am EST I felt I had a good synthesis of them in my head and an idea that felt fun enough to me to get cracking on some photoshop mockups after initially doing a little writeup on the game.  For now though it is om nom nom time.  Good morning LD!

I was expecting burrowing to win for some reason so it came as a bit of a shock when the theme announced from the voting was caverns.  I think it will take some careful thought and inspiration for me to find a game that I’ll enjoy doing that won’t just be a clone of so many of the other cavern themed games it seems I’ve played in the past and even recently with games like Spelunky in the popular collective conscious.  I’m pretty tired from a long day so I might just retire early and sleep for a bit on the theme.  My subconscious works fairly well on game themes so I’m hoping if I relax and brainstorm a little as I drift off to sleep I’ll have some inspiration.  Good luck everyone, LD15 has begun!

…if my game colors are off I can always blame that horrendous peppermint striped covering I’m using to hide the splintered sheet of 3/4″ plywood.  I’ll probably remove the bucket hat from my left speaker if I have to do any audio too…

I’ll likely be using a global leaderboard with my Flash game entry like last Ludum Dare because it can be really fun to encourage competition with fellow LDers on your game. I remember a few Flash devs being curious about the process so I wanted to post a brief step by step tutorial for those of you who want to take the plunge this weekend. If you are using AS3 I’ll also be hanging in the IRC channel and am happy to answer any tech issues you may have if you choose to implement these.

Without further ado — 10 Steps to Global Leaderboards:

1. Login or create a new account over at MochiMedia.
2. Once you are logged into your ‘Dashboard’ click the tab called ‘Add Game’.
3. Fill out the ‘title’ and the ‘dimensions’ of your game. For the purposes of LD15 you don’t have to worry about using ‘Live Updates’ (their distributed version control system) so you can leave it on ‘No’ if you’d like. Click the submit button.
4. At the next screen you can totally skip all these settings and hit the ‘Done’ button at the bottom if you’d like. Why? Well that is because all the settings on this page are related to using advertisements in your game which you probably don’t want to do for the purposes of LD15. Ads aren’t required at all to use their global leaderboards.
5. Once you’ve clicked done you will see your game’s title in the game list on this screen. It should have a little ‘pause’ icon next to it. Don’t worry, this doesn’t matter. Click on the title of your game.
6. Once you’ve clicked on the title of your game click the ‘leaderboards’ option to setup your highscores.
7. You will see a little info about the leaderboards but the important part is to click the ‘Create Leaderboard’ button at the bottom.
8. On the ‘Create Leaderboard’ screen enter the title for your leaderboard (ex: “Highscores” etc), optional description, and then any scoring format/sort data. Fairly self explanatory. If you are using a traditional ‘high scores = better’ then the defaults will probably be fine for you. One thing you may want to mess with is the color / transparent and formatting options near the bottom as that will let you configure the leaderboard widget to match your game’s color theme. I often do ‘transparent’ so that my game background will show through when this is displayed. You can edit this later as well. Click ‘Create Leaderboard’ again at the bottom to generate yours.
9. Your leaderboard should be created now and you will be looking at a screen displaying it. The link now that you want to click on is called ‘actionscript code’. A bunch of fields will appear along with 2 radio buttons. One for AS2 and one for AS3. Pick the appropriate technology for your game. Also note your ‘game ID’ and ‘leaderboard ID’ as you will need these later.
10. You can use these provided code snippets in tabs labeled ’submit score’, ’submit score and name’ and ’show leaderboard’ to get the relevant editable code snippets to drop in that will connect your game to your leaderboards.

Can’t wait for the theme!

I thought it would be only fair to provide a quick rendering of my workspace ahead of this weekend’s compo to give you all enough notice…

That’s right.  I got a Game Tron recently.  It is currently configured to publish an AS3 Flash game though I’m still fiddling with the param sliders a bit.  I’m hoping I won’t need the slider on the far right.  Good luck everyone.  Looking forward to this weekend quite a bit.  See you in the LD pits.