• Man
  
• Infrequently
• Nervous
• Inside
• Most
• Advanced and
• Large
• Invented
• Ship
• Test ( or trauma )

That’s what I planed to call it but family matters decided otherwise. Compo is over for me, I’ll never have the time to finish. Seriously, someone should come up with a “occupation-for-wife-or-girlfriend-during-ludum-dare”-dare.

Anyways, my game was to be a bullet hell style shooter without a shooting button mixed with a block puzzle. Basically, bullets have color. When you’re hit, you accumulate charge. If the next hit is from a bullet of a different color, you fire and start charging the new color and so on. The goal is to accumulate as much as possible charge of one color to destroy incoming blocks. Not very clear, isn’t it… Here is a screen shot. You can also try the latest builds here : Mac / Win / Linux

Good luck to those still fighting through the final stretch and congratulations to all who already posted their contributions ! Can’t wait to give them a try !

- jujule

It’s a busy week-end and I hate the theme ( but of course ! ) but I’m in !!!

I have an idea but I’m not so sure it fits the theme. Yet my always lo-fi ASCII art graphics might put me back on tracks.

Tools :

• Unity 4 + previous entries code + ASCII Art tools
• Photoshop
• BFXR and Autotracker

Good luck to everyone ! Can’t wait to try your games !

- jujule

Phew, about 1 hour left !!!

The game takes place in the past.

You want to be evil and the Evil Master of the Evil Clan
looks at you but at the same time he looks at the beautiful
waves behind you and deeply smells the salty scent of
the infinite sea. After a long pause he says :

“Dude, TRULY EVIL PEOPLE need a tall EVIL TOWER.”

Find the entry here. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

I’m in for my second real Ludum Dare. I’m very very excited !

I’ll be using :

• Unity
• the ASCII Rendering Framework I developed for Unity called TrueColorCP437. Available here.
• some Manic Shooter code I made for MiniLD#36, source available here

Well, good luck to everybody ! See you all tomorrow !

- jujule

Hi to everybody. Here is my post mortem for The Princess Digs Zombies, the game I made for the October Challenge 2012.

First, the result : I failed… I finished and submitted the game on Kongregate about 10 days before the end of the challenge but didn’t manage to make a dollar. On November 1, I was at $0.51 in revenue.

What went wrong :

- I completely underestimated ( again ) the time I needed to finish the game.

- I was so worried of not having enough time to make money on Kongregate that I published too early and didn’t play test the game enough. I missed a huge design flaw that was of course immediately spotted by players. From that moment the game never got better review than 2 stars ( and rightly so ) and could therefore never attract enough people.

- design flaw : I was so obsessed about how I wanted the game to be played that I could never imagine that their would be other ways to play it. There was : just push up and you can beat the game in no time, not even looking at the screen. So the problem was not only that I didn’t take enough time to play test the game, but I should also have had it tested by others

What went well :

- I had fun !

- I finished something in time and submitted it !

- I made not only 1 but 2 products ! There is the game of course but I am now also selling the ASCII console tool I developed for it on the Unity Asset Store. Look for TrueColor CP437 in the Asset Store if you are interested in it. Or checke the web page.

Well, if you went that far, thank you for reading. Congrats to everybody who participated. See you for the next miniLD !

-jujule

The Princess Digs Zombies

It is the near future of our distant past – the galaxy is irrelevant. President Ronnie is happy in his castle colored in white.

After years of good service he has decided to marry you, the Prince of Navy Seals, to his beautiful daughter. But on the night before your wedding the princess escapes, leaving only a note :

“The Zombie Lord is cooler than you, nicer than you and smells better than you. So long, bro-dude or dude-bro.”

Incidentally, the next morning, the road to Hell is overrun by zombies.

Time to fight !

On the Road to Hell !!!

Is this the Zombie Lord ?

You can play The Princess Digs Zombies on Kongregate following this link. I hope you will enjoy the game.

Hi to All.

My entry for the October Challenge is called The Princess Digs Zombies. I originally started this game for the MiniLD #34 which theme was “dare”. I love RTS games but suck at them so I dared to mix a RTS game and a Tetris / Columns game. I couldn’t finish in time but I felt I had to get back to it somehow. The October Challenge was the perfect incentive.

The game is developed with Unity. So far, I have rewritten the whole game from javascript to c# and strongly rationalized gameplay which made programming so much easier. In the process, I am also testing my handcrafted ASCII console package ( which I plan to release on the Unity asset store later, but I guess middleware is an alternate way to monetize your game ).

I’d say the game is 90% finished when it comes to code, graphics and story. I plan to spend the end of the week balancing units and maybe adding a final boss : the Zombie Lord himself ! My plan is therefore to release the game on Kongregate by next monday. I have no idea if I can make a dollar within the 10 days or so remaining.

What I’d love to do is to add an iOS version with a two players mode but I’m also not sure I can do that within the time I’ll have left…

As usual, I am amazed at what some other contestants have already manage to pull out. Congrats.

- jujule

screenshots :

So here is where I am at the end of the first day.

Story :

An unknown Shadow Agent has implented K-pop augmented kittens in every Zombie Scientists from the Center Brain of Planet Mars. As a result all mega-neural-computers of said Scientists have started manufacturing a new weapon of mass destruction : the Random Evolution Bomb. These devices, dropped on our planet, randomize evolution of all animals within their range, effectively creating monstruous hybrids.

Of course, your hot girlfriend is the key to saving the world : here genetic code holds the identity of the shadow agent and the map to the Zombie Scientists weapon factories is tatooed somewhere on her body. Cut through the army of randomly evolved monsters and reach her to save the world !

Good luck.
Kisses.

So, that’s it. Each level is a random map, with an increasing number of random bombs dropped on each of them. It generates dangerous hybrids that you have to fight. I have an ASCII console working in Unity ( should have made it before hand and published it, I lost 4 hours on that ), random map generation is working and animals are internally defined as a list of body parts I can rearrange at will.

Tomorrow I’ll start working on the combat system. I still don’t know if I’ll try a sort of top / down beat them all or a JRPG fighting system. Probably the later, considering the time I have left.

A map and a list of all animals on it.

Good luck to everybody, that’s a tough theme.

- jujule

Hi,

It’s all in the title.

Considering the theme ( please, no kittens !!! ) I’ll be using either Unity or Inform 7.

Go luck to everybody. I’m looking forward playing your games !

- happy jujule

You can find the entry here.

I wish I had added more patterns and make the game more relevant to the theme… Well, I’m happy I could submit something with a start screen and an end.

Please comment.

- jujule

Hi to all !

In deep space near the far corner of the Earth
you are the AI of a reincarnated zombie.
The council of the dead planets societies gave you
the Soul Charge Bullet weapon
to help you destroy the Soul Fire alien race of demons.
Prove your hot japanese neo-girlfriend you can do it.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

This is my second Ludum Dare and I may be able to deliver something by tomorrow night. I interpreted «Contrast» as one against too many. Not so original, since I believe this is true for 99% of video games.

In Soul Charge Bullet, each level pits against a manic shooter boss and you have only one bullet to take it down, only this bullet can’t be fired so easily : you have to «scratch» against the enemy’s shots to charge your own weapon. When ready, aim and fire : you have only one chance.

What I am happy with so far :

- manic mechanism is pretty robust, no crash, no slowdown ( on my 2011 MacBook Air )

- I can deliver something !

What I am not happy with :

- only one boss so far, hope for three by tomorrow.

- gameplay mechanics are really way too generic especially for such a theme.

Please give it a try. You can find it here. Windows users, please tell me if the windows version works properly since I don’t have a windows machine at hand.

Thanks for reading,

- jujule

This is what I have so far. The idea was to mix Tetris and Real Time Strategy. Each block in the Tetris pieces is a military unit. Kill enemy units, get some money for it, buy stronger units, break through their lines and rush to the castle.

Everything was progressing fine until this morning when I realized that :

1) there is a terrible performance issue. Maybe Unity was not the best tool for this kind of 2D project.

2) programming a Tetris playing AI in 48 hours for the opponent is a bit of a foolish endeavor.

Anyways, I’ll be working on it till midnight, just to see how far I can go.

Hi to All !

I’m all prepped up for my first Ludum Dare : I have a pile of sandwiches and an even bigger pile of “pain au chocolat”, more than enough to sustain myself for the next 48 hours.

My goal is to at least submit something finished.

Good luck to everybody.

-jujule