First of all, here’s the timelapse: Making Metagun timelapse

This LD was timed extremely well for me, hitting one of the few free weekends I have these days.
During the voting rounds, I hoped for Skyscrapers, so I could do a life-in-the-city simulation that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. Of course, it didn’t win, but instead the somewhat hard to work with “Enemies as Weapons” won. Because the theme gets announced at like 4 am my time, I was asleep when it got announced, but I managed to wake myself up at about 5 am to see what it was. I stayed up for a couple of hours, thinking about what kind of game I could make, but couldn’t think of anything interesting.

So I got some more sleep. When I got up, I almost felt like giving up. There just wasn’t anything interesting I could do with the theme. But since I had promised people I’d livestream it, I eventually got online and started brainstorming. Not long thereafter, I got the idea of having a gun that shot other people who shot back at the player. I figured it’d make for an interesting platformer mechanic if you yourself were responsible for the dangers in the level.

And strangely, after that, I never ran into any real problems. I implemented some basic physics and rendering framework, then added some graphics, and got started on level design pretty early. I added new features to the game as the levels demanded it, which both meant that new features would get introduced gradually, but also that I didn’t waste any time implementing stuff that never got used.
I felt relatively finished with the game when there was about six hours left, so I spent a few hours just polishing it and adding some fluff features like an ingame credits list and such.

I think I got a bit lucky this time around by finding an idea that fit my style pretty well, but I also felt some experience from old Ludum Dares help me guess how long certain features would take to implement.

What went right:
Almost everything went surprisingly well! I had a great flow this time.

What could’ve been improved:
As usual there is no music. But worse, the jumping still feels a bit off. I should’ve spent more time early on to really nail it.

I made it! It’s a bit difficult at times, but that’s what makes games fun, right?

You can play it by clicking here.

I’m looking forward to playing everything everyone has done, the screenshots I’ve seen sure look tasty! But first, sleep.

I woke up after about eight hours of sleep, shuffled to my computer to get an early start, and checked the LD news stream. And it was full of awesome screenshots and even cooler, screenshots of games I saw yesterday, but they look much nicer now!

You guys kick all kinds of ass!

I managed to get lots of stuff done for Metagun today, including the first mini boss fight and some basic level progression.

And sfxr is the best program ever made.

I’ve uploaded the latest version here, so you can play it:
http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/

I will go get some sleep now, then tomorrow I will just focus on cramming in as many screens of content as I can, adding new features and blocks as I go. There’s some pretty interesting bullet hell mechanics going on that I will probably explore further, and I need to make the title screen for the game as well.. But I feel like I’ve got plenty of time, so I’ve got a good feeling about this.

Good night, y’all’s!

You play a guy in a fodora hat who recently found a cannon that fires tiny angry brown guys. Use platforming skills and puzzle solving to beat the levels and reach the end of the game. Although almost nothing of that is in place yet.

You can play what I’ve got so far here:

Play Metagun!

First of all, here’s my setup:

I will be livestreaming the entire ludum dare here, as soon as I get started: http://www.mojang.com/live/

I had a few ideas in mind for some of the other themes, especially for skyscrapers. While I had a feeling enemies as weapons might win, I totally wasn’t prepared for it to actually DO so.
So now I’ll start by eating some food and trying to work out what game I’m making. This is going to be FUN! =D

Good luck, everybody! And have fun, for those of you in the jam!

You know what to do! Vote for it, and I’ll give you money!

(disclaimer: no money will be given)

At this very moment, I’m rising up to the challenge of my rival (if you know what I mean)!

As usual, I’ll be working in Java and Paint.net, and I’ll be making a timelapse AND streaming the whole shebang live on livestream so people can listen to me ramble more and more incoherently as the hours fly by. My meals will probably consist of red meat and pizza, possibly with some yakiniku, and I’ll be drinking coffee, red bull and water.

I know I’m setting myself up for disappointment, but I’m really hoping for skyscrapers! (or enemies as weapons..)

YouTube, Torrent (782 mb) or Real time

And I’m DONE!

Lessons learned:

* Writing and maintaining a TODO list works really good for motivation. When I started doing that at the start of day 2, my productivity shot up through the roof
* You can’t make a roguelike in 48 hours. Roguelikes need balancing. But I tried!
* The Livestream chat ban function is broken. Why not just have ip banning?
* Coffee can be TOO strong

To everyone who submitted: Great job! I can’t wait to try your games!

To everyone who’s still working on their games: You can do it! Only a few minor tweaks left!

To the people who gave up: Boooo!

Play here

I JUST got the inventory system to work ok, meaning you can pick up items, drop items, and equip items. They automatically go in a suitable free slot if there is one.

Monsters drop loot when killed, scaled to the difficulty level of the level, and loot can have prefixes that add bonuses, like “Golden”, which adds 100% to the selling price of an item.

Still to do is implement more item types (armor, helmets, pants (PANTS!)), make the powerups from the items work, add shooting  and ammo, make some proper monster types, add level transitions, and think of some kind of ending to the game.

Oh, and I should probably make the different jobs actually behave differently as well, and perhaps make the stats matter in some way.

With 50% of the time remaining, I’d say I’m about 30% finished with this game.

I have NO idea what I’m doing, but I’m having a blast.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

The art style (8×8 pixel blocks with grayscale and one dynamic color) is REALLY limiting.

I need to get cracking on making a game out of this.