After giving up on the 2 colour limitation and the 3 hour coding rule I’ve managed to make Bunny, Chicken, Dinosaur into something playable and upload it. Unfortunately it’s Intel Mac only for now but I will get a Windows version up as soon as I can wrestle it into submission and make it compile.

It could do with a lot more tweaking and polishing but for now I’m fairly happy with it given the amount of time spent on it. There are plenty of glitches I could iron out but I’m running out of energy for today.

Enjoy.

Edit: Windows version is up now.

It’s almost time to start coding. I’ve got a few pages of notes which hopefully will help things go smoothly during the 3 hour coding spree.

Bunny, Chicken, Dinosaur! stars a bunny, a chicken and a dinosaur escaping to a place where their unorthodox love will be accepted.

So far I’ve gotten around to drawing sprites for the main characters. I’m thinking of relaxing the two colour restriction a little to allow two colours per layer, depending on how things look.

The next step is to get some backgrounds drawn and plan how they will be represented in game. I’m hoping to get as much planning as possible done before I start coding, due to the 3 hour rule. The code will pick up various settings from external data to allow tweaking of visuals and gameplay after the the 3 hours for coding is up. I will post some notes from the planning stage once I’m ready to start coding.

Hey, I’m back for more after vanishing for a while due to crunch time at my day job.

My current plan for MiniLD #24 is a jump ‘em up similar to Cannabalt but with the player simultaneously controlling two or three with slightly differing abilities. It might turn out horribly tricky but at least then it will satisfy the “Game must end in 60 seconds” naturally.

I will be using the sprite engine I made for LD #18, with a few bits bolted on (support for sound). It can be found on github.

There will be 2 or 3 playable characters because I haven’t decided if the third character will be playable yet. It will either be running to escape like the others or the game will be set in its gut. More on that later.

Theme: Will be one of true love, tainted love and Tetris is now a game.
Limitations: 2 colours, 1 button only (per character, will be 2 or 3 total).
Rules: Game must be code complete in the first 3 hours, if not, must start over. NO CODING AFTER THAT.

I’ve been tinkering with my LD 18 game over the past week and a half. The main things I’ve added are online leaderboards, background graphics and better in game help.

It seemed like the main problems with my game were confusion over how to play, very bare gameplay unrelated to the ‘story’ mentioned in the readme and misunderstandings over the goals. There are now several pages of in game help explaining the mechanics, with pictures, that will hopefully clear up how the vacuum mechanic works. I’ve added some nice tile mapped backgrounds and an intro ‘cutscene’ which should indicate that you have to defend the area beyond the left of the screen. Finally, it’s basically a score based endurance game so the leaderboard should emphasise that part of it.

Astrovax also turned out quite addictive, hopefully the leaderboard will make it more so. >:D

The new version can be found at astrovax.moop.org.uk.

Somehow I’ve gone from feeling like I’d barely started to being ‘finished’ in a couple of hours.

My entry is posted here. I like the core concept so I’m planning on doing more work on it after the competition to polish and add the missing features I’d like to have added.

I have a timelapse recorded but it’s taking a long time to convert and there is work in the morning. Will upload tomorrow.

I’ve finally got my sprite engine into a workable state. Time to begin work on the game proper.

Right now I’m thinking of making a shoot’em up with a vacuum cleaner like primary weapon that sucks weakened enemies in. Various combinations of enemies when sucked in can be transmuted into more powerful but more specialised weapons, possibly saving up multiple of these will allow them to be permanently merged with the ship to give some sense of progression. I suspect balancing the attention required to work the transmutation system with the attention required to play the game will be tricky.

Will post some lovely screenshots when I have something.

My basecode/engine is slowly being hacked together and hurled onto github:

http://github.com/mooped/MoopEngine-sprLite

This will be my first LD, looking forward to it. I want to get coding already.

I’m planning to build a very cut down sprite engine using C++ and OpenGL/GLUT. The engine I have already is a bit heavyweight for that sort of stuff, so I’ll start from scratch but aim for the same style and structure.

Now time to stop being a big lurker and head into IRC.

Tools I’ll be using:

Programming:
vim for editing
git for version control
XCode (C++) as a build system and compiler
Visual C++ 2008 for the Windows port
OpenGL, GLUT and OpenAL as libraries

Graphics:
Photoshop CS for generating content
make + ImageMagick for batch conversion to a more useful format

Audio: (if there is time)
Reason 3 for music
sfxr for sound effects

Community:
I’m planning to record a timelapse video over the weekend using this technique.
Fingers crossed I’ll end up with a nice and reusable sprite engine at the end of it. The plan is to continue developing it for my own projects, future LDs and keep the latest source available.