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

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.

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.

It’ll run as an applet, and will have basic tiled graphics (basically just a glorified custom font). The perspective is that weird ultima 6 perspective since it tiles really well.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I’ve got my chronolapse set up, the livestream is going, and eclipse is set up to a brand new empty workspace. Now all I have to do is wait.

Good luck, everybody! And have fun!

AND I’ll be streaming the entire mess directly via livestream.

My plan is that everyone else will be too busy watching the stream to actually make any games. Muoahah.

Also, I changed the applet version to allow resetting the level with escape or backspace, but that is NOT the competition version of the game. A link to the competition version is provided on the website.
It’s a shame I forgot to add this during the competition, as it’s fairly easy to get stuck.. :-\

Download the zip file
OR
Play online right now!

Dev log below:

– day 1:

06:09 am:
Just woke up. Advancing wall of doom, eh. Right.
First, I google image search to see if I can find any inspiration..

06:49 am:
Got the game idea. You’ll play a care taker that tries to keep a bunch of bunnies alive in a room with advancing walls.
There will be blood.

08:00 am:
Sudden doubt. This isn’t going to be very fun, is it? Craaaap!

09:06 am:
Ok, I’ve got an animated main character now, and you can walk around.
I should start adding some bunnies. Or levels. Or.. arrrgh!!! I should make a todo list.

09:32 am:
I think I’ve figured out how to do the graphics now. It’s a pseudo 2.5d deal where sprites really are 16×16 pixels,
but are rendered from 16×24 pixel blocks.
Should look ok. =)

09:57 am:
Great, level collisions are in and seem to be working. I should add pushable blocks next.

11:45 am:
Pushable blocks are working, and so are the huge crushers.
Well, they don’t CRUSH yet, but they at least shove things around and stop when blocked.
Time to draw some bunnies, yay!

1:17 pm:
There are jumping bunnies now.. Eight colors of them!
I’m STILL not sure how this is going to become a game, but we’ll see.

2:52 pm:
Spent some time working on a title track. It’s very bad, but at least it’s music.
I made a silly title screen for the game with a scared bunny, and came up with the name “Bunny Press”.
Lovely. =D

– day 2:

9:37 am:
19 hours to go. I just woke up.
I think I’ve decided to turn the game into a turn based puzzle game instead.
I guess I should just be bold and do it.

4:32 pm:
12.5 hours to go. I list inspiration a lot and spent the day with my girlfriend. I ate a kebab!
I decided to finish the game regardless of if it’s fun or not. This should be interesting.
I’m sticking to the real time plan.

5:23 pm:
I’ve added particle effects for various crushes, like crates and bunnies. I HAVE to add gameplay now.

5:41 pm:
The bunnies now avoid the player in a fairly interesting way. It’s still not a game.

6:53 pm:
Oh snap, after chatting a bit in #ludumdare, I just realized the game is about the PLAYER surviving,
not the bunnies. The bunnies are SUPPOSED to die.

7:44 pm:
Time passes very very fast. There’s a bunch of blood effects now, but still no gameplay at all. I need to make it
possible to finish a level, AT ANY COST OMG! Crap.

8:08 pm:
There’s ice now. It’s slippery, but only for the main char.

8:22 pm:
Locks and keys! And a level exit that doesn’t really work yet.

9:07 pm:
The level exit works, the intro screen is in place, and there’s a small level splash screen as well. I think it’s
time to start building levels.

9:44 pm:
Things are going pretty well. I’ve got three fairly interesting levels done, and I think I’ve actually got a game
here somewhere.

12:38 am:
11 levels done, and I added sound. I think it’s time to call this a game and wrap it up.
Phew. I can’t believe I made it.

Wow, finally!

I was freaking out bad, convinced I wasn’t going to be able to make it into a game when the nice people in #ludumdare suggested making the game about surviving the levels and having the bunnies just act as cannon fodder. I added a few random objects, and suddenly the game turned FUN!

Now I just need to add a bunch of levels, and hopefully even sound, and I’ve got myself a game!

You can try the first three levels by clicking here.

The wall crushes everything in its path now, and there’s blood. The rocks will continue rolling for a bit if you push them, the carrots attract bunnies, the player repels them, but there’s absolutely no gameplay still.

Crap.

There’s a title screen now. But I don’t think I’m going to be able to make a game out of this random mess of bunnies and crates, heh. Time for a break, I think.

I’m going to a bday party in an hour or so, and after that I hope to be full of ideas on how to make this a game. =D

Bunnies, advancing walls of doom (the spiky things), and player interaction.

I have NO idea how to turn this into a game..

He can walk around already, and he even blinks at random. It’s not a game yet, though, I’d better get cracking.

You play the role of a bunny caretaker. Your job is to make bunnies not die.
The game is a level/screen based puzzle game where you have to save at least a certain number of bunnies on each screen before advancing to the next one. The problem is that there’s a huge spiky wall advancing from the left, crushing everything in it’s way. You can stop it temporarily by putting things in its way, but it IS going to crush everything sooner or later.
There will be blood and heaps of bunnies with fuzzy ears. And probably a few carrots. Perhaps even copulating bunnies.

Tonight, I go to bed relatively early, then I get up at 7 am tomorrow, two hours after the competition starts. I spend most of the day tomorrow getting an early playable version of the game up and going, then at 5 pm or so I go to my friends 30′th birthday party.
There I do some light drinking, heavy guitar hero playing, and massive eating, then I get back home at about midnight to implement all of the ideas I’ll have thought up while not thinking about ludum dare.

The next day, I sleep for as long as I can, then spend the rest of the day finishing up the game, polishing it until it hurts, and fixing any final game play issues that might have arisen.

I’ll do a timelapse for sure again, and I’ll try to get as many entertaining pics as I can. I’m considering doing a video log on my Eee to document the development process.

Exciting! =D

Oh, and here’s my desk:

It was SUPPOSED to be a zombie road carnage splatter fest with advanced scoring. Instead it ended up as an abortion of a physics test that you can try by clicking this link.