This would be my 4th LD.  On the fence because I’m flying home on Sunday, and it’s a long trip that arrives just around the submission deadline.  I would most likely submit from the airport after we land.  The plan would be to get the game done with placeholder art before I have to go to the airport so I can work on art and music while traveling.

• SDK – Frank Engine
• IDE – Visual Studio Express
• Art – GIMP
• Sound – SFXR, Audacity, and Rock Band

This will be my 3rd Ludum Dare.  In previous LDs I made “Protractor” and “Light the Way”.  Here’s my plan:

• SDK: Frank Engine – My open source 2d game engine (integrated with Box2D DirectX)  This is a pretty solid engine if anyone else is interested it’s very easy to set up with Visual Studio Express.  The screenshot above is from the included sample game.  I recently released a fairly epic metroidvania style game using it called “Mother Lover”.
• GFX: Drawing stuff by hand and scanning it in, editing with GIMP
• SFX:  Making my own sound effects with stuff around the house
• Music: Rock band on IPAD and/or guitar.  There may be a kazoo involved.

Lets get some upvotes on reddit for the LD 20 results…

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ho9kj/ludum_dare_20_results_352_games/

I had precious little time to spend on my game this weekend.  I needed to be at my work late Friday then most of Saturday and today.  However, I’m not one to back down from a challenge and somehow I was miraculously able to cobble together an LD game in about 10 hours.  It’s called “Light The Way”.  The concept is that if it’s dangerous to go alone, get someone to help you.  I think I’m going to have to call it finished since I will probably not get any more time to work on it today but if I’m super lucky I might get a few extra minutes later tonight.

Link to my entry “Light The Way”

Unfortunately I had to work late last night and will need to be at work for most of the day today.  However I do have a decent idea and I’m starting to put something together in case I’m luck enough to have tomorrow off.  I will need to cut corners everywhere but I may still be able to squeeze something out.  Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my progress…

All set for LD 20.  Armed with…

• Code: Frank Engine with Box2D and Visual Studio Express
• Art: Gimp, a sharpie, a camera
• Sound: Audacity, LMMS, SFXR, wolfram tones, Les Paul

I’m also considering translating all my in game text to Japanese and back to English just for the hell of it.

I created a Wikipedia article for Ludum Dare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludum_dare Please feel free to expand on what we have there so far.  I had trouble digging up results of competitions before LD15 and was unable to find the winners pre LD10.

Let’s do this thing!  It’s my second LD.  I will flying from Austin to Philadelphia (with a stopover in Chicago) on Saturday so I can guarantee that at least a portion of my game will be written in flight.  With all the traveling it’s going to be a real challenge but I shall do my best.

• Language: C++
• Engine: The Frank Engine (my open source engine)
• IDE: Visual C++ 2010 Express
• Graphics: DirectX
• Distance: ~1900 miles

Last week I participated in Ludum Dare 18 and after some intense work delivered an interesting little game called Protractor, here’s a link to my competition entry.  Leading up to the comp I played some winners of the previous Ludum Dare to get a good feel for what I could hope to accomplish.  I prepped my dev environment, picked up groceries, and set up a special SVN branch for this comp so I could make engine hacks or workarounds without any worry about breaking other projects.

On Friday night when the theme was announced I just sat there and thought while scribbling some ideas on paper.  I wanted to do something with physics and attaching enemies or weapons to yourself.  At first I was thinking of doing a round planet with humanoid figures using telekinesis.  I started to set this up in code but wasn’t really feeling the idea so I just went to sleep.

Saturday morning I took a quick look at games with a similar concept for inspiration, specifically TUMIKI Fighter and Captian Forever.  My design is based on simple abstract shapes so they are easy to recognize on form alone allowing for the color to represent health.  I also planned on having random weapons with random colors and lots of trails all over the place.  For color values I have it set up so I can randomize over HSV space to get away from the RGB kind of look.

Building off the clean project in my game engine I set up an object oriented structure where there’s a base class shared by the player and enemies, a base class shared by all part types, and everything derives from a GameObject which is part of the engine.  By about 3 PM Saturday I had the player moving around with the ability to pick up parts and attach them.  But so far the only part was a weapon and it was always the same default weapon.  I took at least 2 hours to put some polish on that system with grabbing and attaching the weapon parts.

Around this time I did a little art pass: tweaking colors, particle systems and other visual aspects.  I threw in an enemy that just randomly tried to pull parts to it and shoot.  By the end of Saturday night I wanted to have all of the core functionality in game so I could take the next day to add better AI, polish, balance and tweak.  So I trudged along adding the other 3 part types in a very rough state.  Around midnight Saturday night I posted a screen shot to demonstrate the core functionality.

Sunday I started out by just tweaking lots of little things.  There needed to be some background for movement reference so I just threw in an extremely simple particle system of gray squares.  I worked on the AI a bit and improving their tractor beam use a little.  I made them move around pretty much randomly in near the player.  I tried having them turn to aim but that isn’t very reliable because of their poor ability to configure their ship so I just made them cheat and rotate their weapons directly.  There just really wasn’t enough time to make any kind of real AI at this point.  For all this time I just had the player spawn in next to some parts and an enemy that I had all placed in the editor so I added logic to randomly spawn in enemies and parts out of view of the camera.

This felt good enough so I wanted to spend some time adding random weapons to add both visual flair and gameplay depth.  As a simple balance measure all weapons have the same DPS with different firing rate, bullet damage, and bullet count.  Other aspects like speed, spread, and color are just randomized.  It seemed like a big part of this game was reading where damage was coming from and going too so I had an idea to make bullet size proportional to their damage to facilitate a quick visual read.

As the deadline loomed I started to freak out a little becuase there were only a few hours left and I harly spent any time actually playing my game.  So I took a while to just play and polish random gameplay issues.  I experimented with several different control schemes but decided to go with the simplest which seemed like a good enough choice given limited time.  I threw in some random large solid black boxes to both add an interesting element to game play and visuals while also making the world feel more solid to the player.

With about an hour left I focused on sound by adding more firing sounds and a tractor attach sound.  I scaled fire sound frequency by bullet damage so weaker weapons sound higher pitched to make it sound a little more dynamic.  In the last half hour I just tried to play my game only tweaking a few minor things.  I had a score display of how many enemies were killed with high score tracking but decided to remove it a the last minute.  Adding a scoring system can add a lot to a game but it can also detract if done incorrectly.  I like the idea of just providing a pure experience without the need for imposed goals. The implicit goal of growing your ship is as motivating a factor as any.

It’s was hard to come up with a name for my game in such a short period of time.  I went with Protractor because it sounds sort of abstract and mathematical while also containing the word tractor for tractor beam.  I’m happy with the way my entry turned out and after playing it for a bit since then it still seems to hold up pretty well.  Next time I’d like to try to get some testers lined up, people offered but I was so focused on working that I didn’t take the time to contact anyone.  Also I’d like to plan my time a little better so at the end I have more time to just play and tweak.

It’s impressive how well put together the Ludum Dare competition is.  The judging phase is currently in progress and it’s great fun playing everyone’s game and doing my best to judge.  It’s sort of like playing Wario Ware on a grand scale.  Thanks to everyone who put it together and congrats to those who successfully delivered a game.

My entry is called Protractor.  More info and video on my website.

Still a lot more work to do.  Adding more weapons is next on the list.  Still though it’s sort of a game now.  Here’s the link to the first playable version.  (You will need latest DirectX, get that here)

http://www.frankforce.com/downloads/LudumDare18.exe

Controls are WASD.  Left mouse shoots and controls ship direction.  Right Mouse picks up stuff.  Pick up parts and attach them to your ship.  Kill an enemy and take their parts.

I made good progress today.  Making something a little like captain forever.  Not ready to post an exe but here’s a screenshot.

This will be my first time participating in a Ludum Dare.  I will be using a game development framework that I’ve been working on for a while now and finally decided to open source.  It’s written in C++ with DirectX rendering, Box2d physics, and Ogg Vorbis music.  Dev environment is Visual C++ Express 2010 and DirectX SDK.

There are some pretty nice features included like a built in level editor, huge streamable worlds, particle system, fixed step interpolation, gamepad support, and debug console.  It comes with a clean slate project to build off and an example game.  You read more on my website or the project page on sourceforge. It’s called Frank Engine.