-Phil & Mike & the rest of the LD Staff

Go and check it out! Here’s the original entry.

Also, here’s my Christmas card to you!

Thanks again for joining in LD22!!! Have a great holiday!

-Phil

It’s a flash game, so you should totally check it out right now!!!!

And whenever you want to judge it, here’s the link.

Anyway, thanks everyone for joining in this Ludum Dare, it’s just plain awesome to see 700+ games get made in a single weekend! I hope you all had a total blast jamming and competing! I know I did I’m totally amazed out by the few screenies I’ve seen so far!

-Phil

- title screen
- win screen
- in game timer, text hints
- music, sfx

I’m pretty happy with how it came out

-Phil

I’m using flashpunk and that’s been working pretty well. Using flash is nice because distribution is so super simple

-Phil

Compo code base:
- python / pygame
- AS3, which I don’t know, but I’ve hacked a few crummy things together in it before
- dev under linux and port to windows

Jam code base:
- C++ / PHP if I use any web backend stuff
- or just PHP if I do a multiplayer web game
- dev under OS X and port to windows

Tools:
- iPad with MultiTrack for recording audio clips and sound effects
- the gimp for graphics stuffs
- maybe modplug tracker for music
- sfxr if I need blips and beeps

Them’s the plans! I may do an iOS game if it’s the right theme. I think I might be leaning towards doing something with AS3, maybe I should spend friday learning it a bit in advance so I’m not scrambling to get my skills together.

-Phil

Here’s the deal: I’m using Steam to distribute the beta, so you need a Steam key. I only have a limited number of those, so first come first serve. Get a beta key here. They only work for Windows right now, so if you’re a mac guy like me .. well, you’ll have to wait (or run it under VMWare or something. It works fine that way as well.)

I’m totally looking for any and all feedback you can provide, the game even includes a chat-window that probably won’t be in the final game but is in the beta so that you can chat with me / other players / or just complain about bugs / give suggestions. All the chat is logged so I can review it later

Thanks a ton! This October Challenge has been great (even if it’s lagging into December now ..) TBH I think this game will be done in maybe 2-3 months. But it’s been fun!

-Phil

P.S. If anyone knows a musician who can do good “sneaking around in caves” type music, I’d love to hear about it. Post a link in the comments to their portfolio.

(I’ve already got an artist lined up to help me with adding a bit of sparkle to the logo / icons / menus / etc.)

The mini map only displays areas you have already seen. More or less.

I might try and get a beta going pretty soon here … hopefully that comes together!

-Phil

It’s been a few weeks .. but I’ve been working away on my Anathema Mines (and also getting my crazy Chickon game released!) Here’s a screenie for ya:

DISCO DANCIN’ YAAAAHH!!!

So, yeah, for the real levels I might just have to be a bit more miserly with my laser placement so things don’t start to look silly

-Phil

Last year we did a world-wide gift exchange which was a ton of fun! I’d love to do it again, but I really don’t have time to organize it this year. If there is someone who wants to head this up, please get ahold of me!

Here’s a few things we learned from last year:

- Participating costs about $50 .. Spend about $25 on gift(s) and $25 on shipping.

- Gift must be sent out by the end of November, we try to have most gifts go over seas, so they often take 3-4 weeks to arrive at their destination.

Cheers!
-Phil

Here’s my gameplay demo video. I’m attempting to “monetize” the game as of Oct 31st, so I’ll report back on how well that goes.

It’s been a great month working on this. The game is coming along super-well, I imagine it’ll actually be released publicly in about a month now.

-Phil

I’ve added a level selector to my editor so I can start working on multiple levels in my game:

I’ve added zoom in / out into my editor so I can get the big picture of my layouts:

And I’ve added shadows to my characters so it looks nicer:

Not entirely sure if I’ll make the Oct.31 deadline, but I’m making quite a bit of progress. I’ll keep plodding along and see where I’m at in a few days!

-Phil

Oh, and I grabbed all the sound effects from Dynamite and Escape from Anathema Mines and added them into this game. Makes it feel a bit more lively! I’ve also added “data cartridges” that display text messages when picked up, I guess that’s the cheap way to give a game some vague story-line.

-Phil

UPDATE: Using my cool-sauce edge generation script, with just a few minutes of graphics work I can get a totally different look to my game. This is going to be super helpful to giving my low-budget game the appearance that it has art in it (maybe).

Weird and squiggly:

Fractalicious Puzzle Shaped:

Square:

I think with varying the user flashlight color and varying the floor texture I can probably get some really different feeling settings for the game to take place

-Phil

That said, I think I want it to be editable by normal people. So I think I’ll probably pass on using those weird codes. But at least now I have those cool hex icons for no reason.

-Phil

-Phil

I’m pretty happy with the aesthetic. I’ll have to work on my sprites (the blue circle, etc) to make ‘em better. The gameplay is pretty close to being what I want, so I think I’ll be starting on making actual levels pretty soon.

-Phil

I’m doing another attempt at the game except going overhead instead of isometric and using the aesthetic of an old LD game I made “Escape from Anathema Mines” instead of the one I was doing ..

Anyway, here’s a screenshot. I’m doing brute-force ray casting here and it works great. It’s really nice to be targeting the desktop using C, so I can do stuff like that. (The older LD version was in python so I had to code it smart, and if I were targeting mobile I’d have to be more optimized.) Anyway, my goal is to have this game selling on the Mac App Store before the end of the month for a few bucks.

-Phil

P.S. I coded up some crazy tile generator to get all the wall contours Yay for python!

The donation system is still available if you really want to contribute more. At this point our hosting should be covered for over a year, so contributions above and beyond will be used at the organizers discretion. (I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of giraffes …) But really, we’ll probably keep a hefty buffer in case our hosting costs go up again After the optimization we did to the site, though, I’m hoping our costs will stay under control.

I just want to say a thanks again, this has been an awesome year for Ludum Dare and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012!

-Phil
P.S. a special thanks to PoV (Mike Kasprzak) for setting up the donation system! It worked great!

Thanks again to everyone for making this competition awesome!!!!!!!!! Totally worth it to see 599 games get made in just one weekend

-Phil

I ported my Jam game over to Android !

However, many users have had crashes, etc… if any devs can give it a run and do an “adb logcat” and post the results here, that would be a huge help!

(The game is also available on iOS, PC, Mac, Linux too, if anyone cares to check it out!)

-Phil

UPDATE: Android build is so broken I took it down.