Hey … my October Challenge game is making real progress!

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.)

Originally I had a pretty ugly colored-pixel-per-tile minimap. Some of my alpha testers protested, so I made it look a ton better.

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

Yo!

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

Hey,

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

Hey,

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

So .. some fun stuff here!

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

So .. I’ve done a ton to the game in the last day or so. Got all the in game features working nicely and stuff. The most notable visual change is the addition of characters. Check out these lil’ guys! These are the same guys I used in the original “Dynamite” I made for pyweek like a million years ago. They work pretty well scaled down and tiny. Next up, I gotta add a basic save/load interface for my level editor and then start churning out levels and all that!

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

So, here’s my level editor thing. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to set up the level entrances / exits / pathways throughout the level. Sort of some kind of cryptic code system. I’m not sure how complicated I want it to be. Depends on if I will have the level editing open to the general public or not.

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

Some new goodies today. Well, the explosions I’ve had for a while, but I just added in the technology that you have to destroy in order to defeat the evil over-lords or whatever. The technology is RED that’s how you know it’s EVIL technology.

-Phil

I re-did my lighting systems in the game so now I can have various colored lights and I can add ambient light to corners of the caves. Here’s a screenie:

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

So, last year I tried the challenge and I guess I won, sort of, but sort of not, because I never really finished the game.

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!

Thanks everyone for your generous contributions! It’s awesome seeing the community come together to help keep this site afloat! The FUNdraiser is now over, so may your year be filled with many 48-hour game jams!

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!

Hey … I just put up a post on my blog with the lessons learned from this past weekend about optimizing WordPress. If you’re at all into WordPress, or just want to know more about what I did to the site over the last few days, check it out.

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

-Phil

Hey,

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.

I just had to move my desk during the LD to make way for wall re-painting. And then I moved it back today. Pro-tip: no matter how hard you try to make wires organized it is impossible once you hook everything up.

Note can of blob repellent on the right.

-Phil

I’ve added the protagonist .. the harmless cabin dwellers!

I also decided that my photos of the physical can of Blob Repellent weren’t awesome enough, so I CGed the label on so it looks shinier. Next up – making some real gameplay .. Once I’m happy with that it’ll be time to wrap things up with some good ol’ fashioned polish (music, sfx, menus!)

-Phil

Things are starting to get fancy over here!

Gameplay not quite finalized yet .. still got some things to do to see what makes it feel like a game yet But I’m having fun making stuff: that there is a real live can of shaving cream that I made a custom label for!

-Phil

Looks Yummy, ‘eh?

This is my first venture into using FBOs.

-Phil

So this is what I’ve got so far …

Now I need to figure out how it’s going to be a game I think the game might include “Blob Repellant” as the “Take this!” item

-Phil

P.S. I’ll be making a windows build of the game as well, since iOS games can’t really compete in the compo.

So .. I really liked the theme “absorption” so I kind of ran with that. But I had to make my game fit the actual theme “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This!” .. I figured blobs count for the danger part of the theme. I think it’s going to be a game where you control several characters at once so that’ll be the “not going alone” part. As far as “take this” I still haven’t come up with a way to ramrod that into my game yet Maybe bombs of some sort, those are always good game elements!

Here’s a semi-hideous screenshot of my dangerous blobs:

-Phil