ckaotik and my game – simply named “The Office” – has now been submitted to the jam. Have fun playing and rating, everone, as will we.

A more thorough post with a timelapse and post-mortem will probably follow, but it’s late enough for now, and sleep needs to be had.

You can create characters! You can navigate through 3 story pages!! There are items you can’t obtain yet!!! And awesome pictures!!!! And puns!!!!!
Okay, I’ll stop now.

Go to http://ld23.pastaandcode.de and take a look!

Good morning everybody and a happy 10th anniversary to Ludum Dare!

ckaotik and I started about a couple of hours ago, did a bit of brainstorming for ideas and set up our Base Drupal Page. We’re about ready to start hacking away but wanted to let you all know that during the course of this Ludum Dare, you can always visit http://ld23.pastaandcode.de and check out the current progress.
You’ll have to create an account to actually play, but that’s later.

For now, breakfast time!

4 Ludum Dare’s ago, I went at it alone. Not so this time, as I will be taking part in the jam, joined by my “lovely assistant” ckaotik, a first time Ludum Dare contestant.

Our platform of choice is THIS:

We’ll try to use what the platform and modules give us, and write new modules where needed to bend this CMS into a decent game!

Our editor of choice is Sublime Text 2, along with the usual suspects (Paint.NET / Pixelmator / sfxr or the likes) for our non-programming needs.

We’re looking forward to a fun weekend!

The competition has passed and voting is underway, and I can think clearly again. This 19th Ludum Dare was my first competition of its kind, and I must say I enjoyed it very much.

Timelapse on Youtube (didn’t get it to embed, somehow)

My thoughts are after the break.

(more…)

A very good question...

To bed, that’s where!

I didn’t get everything finished that I would have liked to. There’s room for a lot more upgrades, combat (though it works nice peacefully), multiple endings (only one for now) and nicer art, like backgrounds.

Still, I’m both excited and content with the final product. The last few hours meant quite a bit of panic for me, since I did not have the concentration to space to include really everything I would have liked. I’m looking forward to playing the oodles of great games that have been released and am hoping for somewhat decent votes myself. Though participating in itself was awesome in it’s own right!

Post-mortem and Timelapse will follow during the next days.

I need sleep.

Badly.

Help me, almighty elixir of waking!

I will be done in time! More than 3 hours still to go.

Still missing a title screen, a few upgrades and an exit to win the game. Some tweaking might also be nice. Then, release!

I’ve been neglecting the gameplay for the last few hours, focussing on some sound and mostly graphics and usability updates. But with about 7 hours left I’m pretty sure I’ll have enought time to get a few endings into the game. I hope. At least one…

Either way, it looks and feels much more like a game now:

I’m getting a little tired, however, so I hope I’ll get done somewhat soon. Looking forward to sleeping in during the next few days!

I’m live again!

I just implemented pickups and messages, which should allow me to get some sort of story progression into the game. Next big goal: enemies.

Didn't have any bananas, sorry.

• +10 stamina
• +5 willpower

Code Monkey Set

• (5-Piece Bonus): Look extremely nerdy

OK I’ll stop now. Have an alien voice sample I cooked up while I couldn’t sleep.

18 hours to go…

The compo is almost half over, and there are some awesome projects out there. It gets really difficult not to keep checking for other people’s status every 5 minutes, but it’s something great to do when taking breaks.

Anyway, here’s what I accomplished today: (You can test the current version in your browser – though chrome doesn’t seem to work. It’s a cheating version where you have a ton of resources for testing, though )

• Had about 3 people visit my live stream. Hoping for more tomorrow.
• Downed about 2 liters of orange juice and 1.5 liters of apple juice, along with some cappuchino, water, and of course food. Wow!
• Made a space-game with theoretically infinite maps (currently limited for fast testing and loops around)
• You can fly around, absorb resources (Matter, Energy and “Life”) and explore space in all its colorful glory
• Upgrade your little planet’s facilities (peaceful stuff done, offensive and defensive upgrades coming tomorrow)

Nicely working after day 1. A few simple bugs in it which will be fixed tomorrow.

I’m feeling pretty good about it so far, except maybe for the placeholder graphics. But they’re just that, placeholders.

Plans for tomorrow:

• Weapons!
• Enemies!
• Story!
• second half of the day, make the interface nicer
• Better graphics!
• Sound!
• Release!

But first, a nice 8 hours of sleep would do me good. See you then!

Alright, after a 2 hour powernap I’m rolling again!

Starting to syphon resources from nearby stuff, within a randomly colored universe!

Also, Lunch!

It doesn't look like much, but we're moving our trusty little planet through space on the long road to actual discovery.

Working now on getting actual gameplay in. I probably won’t be doing better graphics until tomorrow or until I can’t concentrate any more. Progress can still be followed on my livestream, if you’re interested.

Alright, for those that want to see somebody struggling with discovering game-making in 48 hours live (see what I did there?) – You can check out http://www.justin.tv/mirroar

Also, I just got up after about 3 hours of sleep, and I’ll be deciding on what game to make while eating breakfast!

Yum!

Timelapse is running and I’m looking forward to some nice games!

I’m certainly not going hungry this LD.

Juices, milk, pasta and some oddities

On another note, I couldn’t help but update my base code a little. I simply forgot about it before, but now added a simple Particle effect class and some angle calculation. You can download the new code if you wish.

All that’s left is setting up the live stream, hopefully catching some sleep, and waiting for the theme to be announced.

Since I intend to enter the compo proper and am prone to just writing stuff myself instead of finding more or less working libaries and make them fit my work, I have uploaded the base code I’ll most likely be using. It’s just a .zip file containing a Netbeans Java project with the following contents:

• Main and MainApplet classes that include the structure for creating a simple window or Java Applet, initializing and running the game.
• TextureLoader, Texture and Animation classes and the IRenderable interface handle loading and displaying of graphics
• Sound and SoundLoader clases for playing sounds
• Path and Pathfinding classes handle generic pathfinding if needed
• The HeightMap class generates an array of numbers representing height on random terrain using the Diamond-Square-Algorithm
• The ludumdare19.system.ui package contains code for simple UI elements so I can easily display text, buttons and the like
• Map, Position and Tile classes are deliberately kept generic to allow for 2D or 3D-based tiles if I make a tile-based game

The code is mostly undocumented and not intended for commercial use. But I’m not stopping anybody. You’d have to set your classpath to contain the lwjgl native files for your OS, though.

Since I have no experience writing a platformer, I’ll most likely write a tile-based Top-Down or isometric game, or something that doesn’t use tiles at all (Like a shoot-’em-up). I’m not making any specific calls, though, since half the fun in my opinion is deciding what the game will be like from the theme. Let’s see what crazy things people will come up with!

Either way, I’m really looking forward to this weekend and hope I won’t have to use the jam as a safety-mechanism to release a game.

Hello everybody, hopefully first-time participant here. Not that I have too much to do during the time of LD #19, but I’m not sure whether my family wants me to spend that time with them.

Either way, on joining I am most likely to develop using Java with lwjgl. I already experimented with it enough to feel confident with putting out something - I should be able to at least set up an applet for everybody to play in their browser.

Alongside that I’ll probably also use a small private library I put together by now. It’s mostly just a Texture Loader and some User Interface code, but according to the rules I have to release the source-code before-hand, right? What would be a good place and time to that? A blog post, comments, …?

Other than that, the only thing I’m slightly worried about is implementing sound, which I haven’t tried to do yet. And of course not having enough time during the competition.

I’m very much looking forward to the event and wish everybody best of luck and oodles of fun!