All right! Our LD22 Jam Entry Aloneasaurus is live in the app store, just minutes before the holiday shutdown.

Go get it, it’s a free download on the app store and try it out! Ratings and comments are much appreciated, both here and in itunes. Thanks!

Aloneasaurus in the App Store

Thoughts and planning already underway for a post-compo version with better tuned gameplay.

Woo! And that was LD22! This was the first time I did the Jam purposefully rather than just using it as a time extension for the contest, and it turned out great. Having an artist to work with was a real privilege.

It’s an iPhone game, so I can’t really upload a binary. What I’m going to do is submit it to Apple later tonight and post a video of the gameplay.

Check out the video! (sorry the first few seconds are messed up). If it’s not clear from the video you control the dinosaur indirectly by sliding the platforms up and down.

As soon as the app is approved by Apple, I’ll put up a link to the app store and so everyone can play and comment on it. I’ll keep the app free for the duration of the judging and feedback time, I might release a post-compo version later.

Anyways! This was a lot of fun and I think this is my most polished LD entry yet.

Link to the Entry Page (I will add the App Store link here when apple approves it)

UPDATE 11:45pm – Submitted to App Store! Will update when available. Email me if you would like to try a build early thru TestFlight.

Wow! I can’t believe how much I’ve got done after the first day. Using an engine (cocos2d) is really paying off. Also the game looks really adorable because i have a real artist helping out.

“Aloneasaurus”

I’ve got the basic game mechanic working — he runs, but instead of making him jump you slide the earth up and down to make him jump or fall on the platforms. That’s right, you are Plate Tectonics! Still needs tons of tuning and content but it’s already fun to play.

It took me forever to figure out an idea for this.

But I’m going with something (hopefully) simple. “The Last Dinosaur”. You are the last dinosaur and must run to try and escape extinction. Yep, it’s going to be a side-runner but with a hopefully interesting twist.

Also, my game artist friend is going to be helping out tomorrow so this placeholder art is actually placeholder for once…

I’m all in this weekend. I have (mostly) cleared my calendar, and I’m ready to go.

Doing something a little different this time, I’m going to do the Jam with an artist friend of mine, NinjaFartOfDoom (I can only assume he meant to type “NinjaOfArt” eh?) and were going to see what happens.

Tools: Depending on the theme and idea, we’ll either use Cocos2D or my basecode (which is getting a bit crufty).

jovoc

So I’m in for real this time. Going to do a team entry with a buddy of mine doing art stuff, so I’ll be doing the Jam this time.

(Click the screenshot for a video, I couldn’t figure out how to embed it directly)

We decided to do a little warm-up today. I’m thinking about using cocos2d and I wanted to try it out before the contest. This is the result, far from complete but not too shabby considering we started at 2pm, a mere 11 hours ago.

Looking forward to the jam!

I’m in for the October Challenge! For serious this time. Last year I used the October challenge to try and finish Planet Minesweeper, which (if you’ve missed my previous posts about it) is basically Minesweeper, on a sphere. The idea actually came out of an incomplete mini-LD entry.

For various reasons, mostly due to the fact that it was barely more than a prototype at that time, I didn’t even come close to finishing.

The “ice planet” tileset, in the first beta.

I’ve been working on it a bit over the last year, but things kind of ground to a halt after a while. In addition, lots of (fun) drama like changing jobs and working on a screenplay and the project was effectively shelved.

But now I’ve come back to it with fresh determination, and have been working away in silence this month until I felt pretty confident that I’ll be able to finish it. That time has come. Last night I sent out the first beta to a few developer friends. If all goes well, I’ll do a wider beta in a week or so. Email me (joeld@tapnik.com) if you have an iPhone or iPad and you’re interested in joining the beta.

For the purposes of the October Challenge, I’m going to consider it “winning” if I upload an app store build by the end of the month, since there’s no way I could finish if I also had to include the wait time for the approval process.

Wish me luck!

Wow, PoV thinks I’m awesome! That’s quite an honor.

But sadly, I will not be awesome this weekend. I’ll miss this one because we’re in crunch time at my new job at Smule, making interactive music thinngys for iDevices.  In the tradition of the contest, here’s a pic of my workspace at the office:

Sorta atypical office equipment. But I’ll definitely following the LD48 action, and coding into the night with y’all, just not on a LD48 entry this time. I might even try to get on IRC if I don’t get too distracted by it. Maybe I’ll try a minigame if I can spare a few hours but we’ll see, anyways I’ll do a mini-LD soon to make up for it.

Good luck to everyone! and vote for FISHING! (I don’t even know if that’s one of the topics, I just want to play a lot of fishing games).

I finally got around to making a little walkthrough of my LD20 entry. So if you had trouble running it or didn’t want to download it, or are just stumped by the staggeringly complexity of the puzzles, then check it out:

Also includes a quick looks at the “Sproxel” voxel editor I used to make the characters and tiles.

Will there be a post-compo version? We’ll see…

I’ve got a working bundle for Mac (64-bit), and builds for win32 and linux up now. In addition, there’s a source pkg with a standalone cmake file which should build easily on all platforms if you want to compile it yourself.

Allright so here’s the windows build:

It’s pretty much exactly the same, except I had to change the opendir/readdir stuff to FindFirstFile. You can still win it in about 45 seconds…

Hopefully this will let more people check it out.

Tomorrow I’ll look into making a properly packaged mac bundle.

Download link at my entry page.

I think this is my most complete LD48 game ever. That’s not saying much, though. There’s about one or two minutes of gameplay, but you can actually win or lose and run around and fight stuff and other game-like stuff.

Press ‘F’ to try the secret, not-really-working FPS mode.

I had some trouble with the mac build. It should work, but you need a 64 bit mac, and you probably need SDL installed, and it has to be run from the terminal because it expects you to be in the game directory to load it’s voxely sprites.

I’ll try and figure out how to bundle it up as a proper app. I’ll also make win32 and linux builds, but those might have to wait until tomorrow. Now, I’m going to take a break for a few hours, and have some dinner.

Go to my entry page for the download links.

So I tried to add a first-person mode. It’s cool as hell but still pretty buggy and there’s still tons of gameplay left to do, so I’m going to drop it, but leave it in as an option (press F). In the original plan, the overworld was going to be first person and the caves and dungeons would be overhead.

And now, here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. The obligatory sword cave:

I still have a ton of code left — you can’t actually use the sword yet for example. And more map rooms. I’m not sure if it will be quite finished by the deadline but we’ll see how far I can get.

These voxels are pretty fun, tho.

After a slight roadblock because I didn’t test my “new” font code as well as I thought I did, I got more gameplay basics in there.

And also there are enemies. And they can hurt you. Woo. But there’s still no way to fight back. And only one map screen. And I’m starting to fall asleep.

Gonna be a busy day tomorrow if I am to finish this.

Starting to look rather zeldish…

My rendering strategy is “punish the gfx card” as you can see by the wireframe.

Hopefull it will be playable soon

Recognize him?

Some scale issues, as vlink is 16x16x16 and I made my tiles 8x8x8… not sure if i’m going to make new tiles or just make bigger things and stick to an 8x8x8 based world. I tried to draw an 8x8x8 link but it was just a green blob.

Ok, well I can draw maps now.

I just don’t have any way to edit them yet (the one you see here is hard-coded). And they look kind of like crap without any lighting.

And, oh yeah.. there’s still gameplay.

hmm.

Well, it’s off to a slow start, but I can render a chunk of voxels.

That’s supposed to be a shrubbery.

I’ve still got a long way to go…

Allright, so I am definitely in. My basecode and code from previous LD48′s can be found here: ld48jovoc , and as usual I’ll be checking in my work in progress as I go. I’ve also started to make a nice, cleaned up version of my basecode here: Luddite Engine , unfortunately I haven’t got very far so there’s not much there yet. Not sure how much of that I’ll use vs. just starting from scratch.

Also, this will be my first LudumDare on MacOS. But all my code is SDL-based so I should be able to release out a windows build as well. I’m trying to move all my art and development to mac now but there’s a few little tools I’m still clinging to on windows.

• Code: C++
• Image editing: Photoshop, al.che.my
• 3D stuff: Blender, Pixexix for texture painting (it’s awesome)
• Sound & Music: garageband, all kinds of iPad and guitar crap
• Voxel Editing: sproxel

Wait, what? Voxel editing? Well.. a friend of mine at work showed me a little side project he was working on, inspired by stuff like Voxatron and Fez:

Sproxel is a voxel editor for making sprite-like graphics. It’s totally incomplete and barely usable, but I convinced him to release it so I could use it for this LD48. Those little blocky things are totally fun. I don’t know why I keep making birds though. Some kind of buried subconscious stuff. Those pics at the bottom are renders out of blender, I made a dumb little script that just makes cubes from the sproxel file.

If you’re brave (or stupid) enough to want to try it, you can get it here: Sproxel Editor for Mac and Win32. It also builds easily for linux. The “file format” is a simple text file that is pretty easy to parse. (Update: there’s some minimal docs now!)

I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to use this or not. It really depends on the theme and the idea. I’ve got absolutely zero voxel rendering code ready so whatever I do will have to be pretty simple. But they just look so tasty it’s hard to resist.

Anyways.. see you all this weekend. From the huge number of votes and posts so far, it looks like this one is going to be absolutely insane.

Update2: There’s a windows build now!

Planet thing is done. Or not done, it’s actually so incomplete that it doesn’t even have a name. But you can download it and “discover” new planets. It’s kind of amusing and the results are sometimes pretty good (but often terrible).

I might try to turn this into a real game or sfxr-for-landscapes tool or something.  And send me the names of any cool landscapes you discover via twitter (@joeld42) or email.

It’s been fun!

Link to the program (please comment if you try it, even though it’s not elegible for voting).