Howdy.
I miserably failed the October challenge 2011. Mainly because I wanted to polish the release version a bit and add some website and example games.
But! I finally made it. You can get the GACK (Gaming App Construction Kit) now for your touchpad (HP, WebOS) or any Android Tablet that has a 1024×768 screen at least.
http://gack.glbasic.com

I sold already 10 pieces. Here’s a link to promo codes for the Touchpad:
http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=7324.0

Yes, I failed miserably because I had to fix some issues in GLBasic that took too much time.
But!! The thing is done. I’m just updating a few example games now and release before x-mas. Here’s a trailer for the complete package:
GACK – gaming app construction kit

I have a new button that allows the users to insert or delete images, that are correctly updated in the animations and level-background lists then. Tiny feature but a lot of work.

The next great thing I added are “elements”. Each player/enemy and shot and “vulnerability” has a set of 4 elements to choose from. You can control what happens on collisions between player-enemy, player-shots, enemy-shots and so on with them. Awesome! I’m so excited.

The last step is to implement a small menu for customizing the controls and an export function that makes stand-alone Apps for WebOS, Android, iOS and PC, Mac, Linux.

I always wanted to make my SEUCK remake into a touchpad app, so you can create games ON your iPad/Touchpad. Now that I have my HP touchpad and development is so much faster and easier, I started finishing it.
I hope to bring it quickly enough to the market to get a $ from it. I also hope that people are willing to buy it.

Plan is to make a touch-only GUI to create full games and make an exporter so you can “sell” the created games for iPhone and WebOS phones (Pre2,3, Veer…)

I also plan to bring at least one proper game as a reference/tutorial.

Current status: It’s working pretty much with touch input only.
I added a lot of ace features like:
-shots/players/enemies have “elements”, so water can attack water and such
-I plan to bring powerups
-I need an option screen for the controls of the mobile devices

GACK sprite editor

It’s quite some read, but it might be of interest for you, especially when you want to participate a LD48 for the first time. I wrote some lines about how and in what order I created a tiny math game for a mobile device.

Not a winner, judging by the already submitted images, but since it’s done, I’ll post it here.

OK, update! Wohoo, finally got something done.
The game is fully playable now. The next step will be some sort of menu system to implement.

You can try it out on windows. Since it’s an iPhone game, the controls are a bit awkard, making the game loose it’s spirit a bit. Please try it – don’t judge it by the boring screen shot. It’s nicely animated.

download:
get it here

I have the game physics working now. You can grab a Windows version at:
WhopIt!

Please read the README.txt, because the PC input differs from the iPhone one.

I finally managed to get the corners auto-rounded to avoid very steep angles.

I think a picture says more than 1000 words (which would be 128 bytes), and a movie even more, so I just made a quick one. Sorry for bad accent.

Whop It – pre-alpha

Yay. I finally polished the graphics of my LD 16 entry “Where is the cheese” and submitted it to the iPhone App Store.
Get it if you like it.

OK, here’s my story of the LD48 compo this year.

First, it was my 2nd LD48 so I quite knew what I could expect. The main restriction for me always is that I have a family that keeps me quite busy at the weekends. But this weekend my wife was invited twice to go out, so my actual time was:
Friday 3am-5am
Saturday: 12am-1pm, 8pm-12pm
Sunday: 8pm-12pm
Sum: 11 hours.

But that’s fine for me. I’m bad at polishing things. I’m quick at prototyping.

What went right:

• The idea. Really, I sat there for 2 hours thinking of a game I could do in ~10 hours and I was close to give up. then came the idea with “explore the fridge”.
• Music, Sound. I’m bad at anything about sounds. I have no idea how to make music and how to make sfx. So for the sfx I just did some “chip chip” and “squeek” sounds using my voice. That gave me the idea, that I do have 5 hours left in my MS SongSmith free trial version. I wrote a few lines in the IDE, launched it and just “sang” as it came to my mind. It was bad. But it was so bad, that it started to be good, again. I kept the first trial w/o any improvements. Had I tried to improve it, I think it would have failed horribly

What went wrong

• MS Paint. Really, usually I use CorelDraw for graphics, but I just wanted to do a quick prototype to see if the idea just works at all. I wanted to redraw the gfx with Corel later, but got no time. The gfx suck totally, but at least the game is fully playable.
• Sleep. I was so excited on Friday, that I woke up too early. I was dead tired on Saturday and close to be sick on Sunday.
• Communication. Really. I was so busy and had just too little time to chat and look what others did, that I have the feeling I missed a good piece of the compo. Might have been because I had so little time, too.
• Sleep. I’m still tired.
• Highscores. Next time I should try to find time to implement a simple online high score table. That might add long time fun to the game, since no one cares how much you can score if you can’t compete with others. Maybe.
• Sleep. I slept too little and feel like I can’t remember what I wanted to do the very second ago

Tools I used

• GLBasic. I’m the author of that language. I hope not to get a pimp hat for that
• MS Paint. Next time I’d better use CorelDraw, because the results are worth it.
• AC3D. For the fridge door I used AC3D, which is a very nice modeller for low poly objects.
• Audacity. For the wav sfx recording I used Audacity with the “save selection as wav” option. Was very quick.
• Microsoft Songsmith. Really, they all post YouTube videos about “Enter Sandman” with MS Songsmith, and they suck. But if you use it in the way they designed it for, the results are quite funny. Don’t expect anything serious. It’s a toy that will produce a joke. I should have saved the file as WAV and convert to MP3, later. That way the Linux version had had music.
• Nettalk. It’s a slim, free IRC program. I can’t program w/o IRC, I’m afraid of being alone

Final thoughts
The game was thought as a joke. I didn’t like the theme a lot, because all my “exploration” ideas were too big to realize in that little time. The feedback so far is overwhelming. Thank you so much. I really thought it’d fail miserably, thus I chose “cheese” in the game’s name. I’m happy that it doesn’t stink in the end.

Where is the cheese is a puzzle game where you have to explore a fridge to find the cheese. After you found it, you will get bonus points for rearranging the goods in groups.

Here’s a screenshot:

I also added a YouTube video.
Where is the Cheese – quick video

Here is the dowload link for the game

I really enjoyed having a few hours for a LD compo. I only attended LD8, before.

Wohoo! It’s a game.

If you like, you can try the attached thing. You explore the fridge in “Where is the Cheese” to find the smelly thing.
You just click on any item, and drag it with held mouse button to another place in the fridge. If you have the cheese, you get bonus points for connected COMBO items in the fridge.

What you say?

I tried to sort them all. It took quite some time. I think I’ll add “bonus” points for a clean sorting of elements.

OK, I have just little time, but I can move the objects around now, and they indicate when I can’t place them or pick them out, because they are behind another item in the fridge.

Where Is the Cheese? - Move test

The idea is to explore the fridge and find the cheese. You can stack up to, say, 3 levels of grocery in each layer of the fridge.
I’ve got no idea where this will be heading to, but it’s working so far.

I also have very little time, because the kids need me today…