I’m thinking about focusing on story this time.

This fits the theme as I can keep the GUI and the code extremely simple. My plan is to write a simple web server based on the Go net/http packages so that players can just run the program and point their browser at http://localhost:port/ to play.

This approach will make distributing to different platforms and adding multiplayer quite easy.

The problem is that I have no idea how to write an intriguing story for a text adventure (or any kind story, thinking about it) so I’ll just have to guess and see what I’ve got after the first day. Any hints, pointers or tutorials would be very helpful!

Good luck to all of you!

I have a reasonably fun game. I think that’s a significant success!

The downside is that I’m getting stuck trying to package it up. For Windows I’ll distribute the .exe, three required .dll’s and all the assets (.png, .ogg). For Linux the best I can do is tell people to install Allegro 5.0.8, otherwise they probably won’t have all the dependencies the game needs. Static linking isn’t possible with the official Go compiler.

I’ve submitted what I have so far. I just hope enough people can get it working and vote on it.

– CLICK TO LOCK AND LOAD -

I have added a reference to goats

Good luck to everbody still going!

Things are going pretty well, apart from features missing from my wrapper. I have a working game, despite its lack of features.

Working game, mostly

A lack of goats though.

I’m in.

I’m going to use my own Allegro wrapper with Go. The main problem is providing the dependencies. At the moment the best I can do for Linux is say that Allegro 5.0.8 has to be installed. Sorry everyone who doesn’t like installing extra packages.

I can’t compile for Mac, so Mac users will have to put up with not having binaries.

Good luck to everyone!

Here we go again…

I just remembered my statistics from earlier. Time for the final ones:

[Items on this side are the commands I used]

Number of lines: 1253

wc -l src/*.as

Source files: 13

Modified lines: 14201

hg churn

Commits to repository: 90

hg log -l 1

Reverted changes: 2

Size of repository: 14MB

du -hc

The source code added to my submission contains my Mercurial repository, so anyone who knows how to use mercurial can download my source and see how the game changed during the course of the last two days.

The logo for ‘Bacon’

The game is finished, although there are some things I would have liked to add. I wanted to add another enemy, so the game is very short. I didn’t add sound because it would most likely have ruined the feel of the game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3221

I don’t want to write a long postmortem, but I do want to write something…

Upside(s):

• The style is distict and consistent
• I think the game is as polished as it could be
• I finished the important elements
• I’ve had a lot of fun

Downside(s):

• I didn’t add audio
• The game is missing a lot of content
• I wasn’t as efficient as I should have been

The main menu of ‘Bacon’

Starting to worry about how much time I have, but the first enemy is working!

Mmmm, bacon!

I thought it would be interesting to post some stats about my source code so far:

[Items on this side are the commands I used]

Number of lines: 531

wc -l src/*.as

Source files: 10

Modified lines: 12537

hg churn

Commits to repository: 35

hg log -l 1

Reverted changes: 1

Size of repository: 4.4MB

du -hc

Now to begin day 2 with a decent breakfast! Good luck everyone!

I made a fairly good start, although it took a long time to think of an idea that would fit the theme while staying fun. The result thus far is about a dwarf fighting a pig. No one said it needed to make sense!

An interrupted afternoon cost me time, but I think I can still achieve what I set out to.

Main menu, as it stands

TODO: gameplay…

Things didn’t go as planned, so we haven’t spent as much time adding to the game as I hoped, but hopefully my colleage, Alexbrainbox, will be able to continue working on it after I leave for holiday tommorrow.

I suspect LD 24 will be easier for both of us because we won’t be interrupted by other things. I look forward to it!

Screenshot of revision 35

A number of features have been added, including a winning. Sadly the game isn’t very interesting yet as some important stuff is still missing. The graphics look nicer though.

Mercurial has proved its worth several times already, with 30 revisions and 12 863 lines changed.

Screenshot of Revision 29

I’m working with a friend on this one, but we have some significant time constraints.

We’re using Flex to build a Flash game with the Flash Punk library, with Mercurial for version control shared between a Linux PC and a Windows PC.

After about four or five hours work, including setting up version control, we have some basic functionality; menus, collision, physics, weapons. Version control reports 20 revisions so far, aparently that’s 12 449 lines of changes!

It’s hardly worth posting a screenshot at this point, but I think the game is playable, save one feature and a win condition.

There’s no way I’m going to finish in time, so I’ve given up.

Trying to complete what would be hard with all 48 hours in much less isn’t a good idea, especially when you haven’t slept enough. I’m too tired and the engine too buggy to do the Jam, so that’s it.

Good luck all, I’ll enjoy seeing what people come up with, I’m already amazed by Notch’s WIP.

Unexpected real life things have galumphed most of day one and a chunk of day two. I still want to enter so I’m going as fast as possible. I have the core engine for a vertical shooter, some ideas, a new version of Blender and very little time!

I spent most of last night learning why planning how the code will work is so important, with the result that I didn’t get much done and produced lots of bugs. I’ve reduced the number of features I want to implement, but I think the bugs are going to make things difficult. Oops.

There’s no point uploading a build, there’s nothing to see.

I submitted Maze++. I’m quite pleased with it. I’m pretty tired.

Trying to avoid producing something the same old maze escape game while writing a maze escape game may not have been a good move, but I’ll wait for comments. If I’m lucky the extra features will keep this game interesting, despite it needing more work.

I had a complete failure of confidence yesterday evening, so I’ve decided to change my idea completely, as I really don’t have the motivation to keep working on this one. I’ve decided to make a simpler game instead, as I’m now short on time. I’ll adapt my current engine to run a maze escape game instead of a platformer.

To avoid making an unoriginal, boring “Escape this Maze” game, I’ll add some extra features, like buttons, doors, TNT, destructible levels, and so on.

I’ve updated my live build, which is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/ld21/build.swf

I’ve made good progress, I started with a fun idea, and Flixel is great for 2d platformers!

My idea: you, the essence of pure evil, have been put in a normal prison by the rather dim-witted forces of good. While the prison guards are mere men, they have been given a good supply of silver bullets!

All you have is an evil toolkit, which will probably contain dynamite and a collapsible rocket launcher, which you will have to use to fight your way past prison guards, machinegun towers and helicopter gunships.

So far I have a system to load levels from bitmaps, scrolling, a character with basic physics and wall jump.

Live build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/ld21/build.swf

I’m pretty sure I’ll be in for LD21, so here is the full set of tools I expect to use:

Geany [IDE]

MXMLC/Flex framework [compiler]

Flixel [library]

SFXR/BFXR [SFX synth]

GIMP [photoshop-like]

Inkscape [vector]

Audacity [sound encoding, editor]

Blender 3D [3D graphics, FX, modelling]

and I might even try and do music:

Seq24 [sequencer]

Qsynth [midi synth]

I’m also hoping my main development PC will be back up by then, the system disk and GPU failed about a month ago, but I should get replacements in a few days, so with luck and the Ubuntu install disk, I’ll have a proper PC instead of a netbook for this one

Starting to get excited, and it’s great seeing all these others joining in. I’ll probably be keeping an eye on Notch’s live stream again

In the last few days, after doing Mini LD #28, I’ve changed my mind about which tools I want to use for Flash development.

For a long time I’ve been using the open source HaXe compiler to build Flash 9/10 swf’s, but I ran into some show-stoppers with it. The biggest is that I can find no sane way of making a preloader work with external API’s (Kongregate, Mochi, etc.), and some other lesser issues with compatibility. This isn’t a big problem for LD, but for anything I want to publish it’s a huge problem.

The best solution is a change of compiler, and main library. As far as I can tell, the best alternative (for Linux, and my code style) is the Flex framework with Adobe’s mxmlc compiler. While it’s slower and not completely open source, it should get round most of the big problems, while still running on Linux and not needing a specific IDE.

At the same time, I’m also starting to use Flixel, because it provides neat ways to do most of the tedious work for me (I hope that’s not cheating ).

The first test will be if I can re-write my Mini LD entry using the new kit. So far I have an almost working core, with stats, players, SFX and AI.

Current public build: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/flixel_sea/build.swf